@AlCp If anyone had been paying attention to Putin from the moment he slid into the vacated 'throne', left by a drunken Yeltsin, you would know that he was bent on restoring the former Soviet Unions 'glory'. He said so in a speech in the early 2000, but it was in Russian and we know about the Anglo world's blindness to foreign languages . . . he was obviously traumatised by watching the demise of the 'great Soviet union' from Germany where he was head of a political prison in Dresden (then Communist East Germany).
I am not claiming to be a historian, so there could be some mistakes of time, years, even, but this is a relative outline of how Russian aggression flew under the radar for so long.
It also pays to do a bit of background digging on that young lout Vlad Putin (from a slum environment! - Navalny in contrast was a well-educated, urbane man of letters); back to Putin: who spied on his school mates to the KGB even as a youngster.
He had a reputation for cruelty in Dresden. He managed to get Crimea back (2014) - which everyone ignored, yes there were sanctions (from memory) but he got away with it, and he slowly sent Russians to live there - so he could later claim that Russians were discriminated against in Ukraine.
Ukraine in the meantime had had unstable governments, some right- some left-leaning, some simply 'there for the money' - the world ignored the Ukraine.
Historically: The Ukraine has always looked West, Lviv was once the capital city of a country called 'Galizia', was part of Poland at one time, and also at one stage part of the Austro-Hungarian empire - Russians and Poles lived in the Ukraine side by side, often in friendship, but also viewing each other with suspicion - the Poles can 'sing a song about the shifting of populations in this area, which went on as far West as Krakow (and the Nazis profited from this). Essentially Ukrainians are far more 'Western', even with mixed blood-lines (Germans have lived there for centuries, but intermarried etc.), - they are more Western than the Russians. Don't misunderstand me, I think there is no 'good' or 'bad' blood-line - just trying to untangle this web of accusations of 'nazi this, that' etc.
(I had an old friend, a German-Ukrainian (German from generations back, but he had the high cheek-bones of a Slav, handsome men, he was, too) - who told me that when the German Nazi soldiers came across the border, he was part of a welcoming 'committee' who had set up tables of food, drink etc. but the German soldiers marched in and knocked all the tables over. Huge disappointment!)
Next the downing of the Malaysian Airlines Flight MH 17 - all 200 plus passengers killed - also in 2014 - these were warning shots by Putin, which the West chose to ignore.
There is no love lost between the Ukrainians and the former Soviets, Stalin caused millions of Ukrainians to starve to death in the 1930s, because they were unwilling to let their farms become collectivized.
. . . and now the West moving ever so slowly towards more autocratic mindsets? It's a sad, sad world!
What is really sad, that, with the oil deliveries to Europe and trade going well, Putin could have made his country as rich as the West. He is impoverishing his people yet again (quite apart from killing its youth).
Back to the subject/abject muzhik status of the peasant during their oppression by their Czarist masters.
Taurisk
