Obama’s CIA coup in Kiev in 2014 toppled Viktor Yanukovych. The Poroshenko regime (2014-2019) began attacking Donbass, a Russian-speaking region historically close to Russia. After 2014, Kiev turned against Russia, the Orthodox faith, and the shared history of the two peoples.
In 2019, campaigning on uniting the ethnically divided former Soviet Republic, Zelensky won a landslide election. Once elected, however, under the thumb of the Banderites, he changed his tune. He could have told Biden, "I won’t sacrifice my country for your war against Russia," but decided differently.
December 2021, Biden rejected Putin’s proposed mutual security accords that would have left “neutral”
#Ukraine intact. Biden told Putin, “Russia doesn’t say who can join NATO.” Once again, as in Minsk I and II, Russia’s legitimate security concerns were brushed aside.
According to ex-Biden adviser Amanda Sloat, senior director for Europe on the National Security Council, Ukraine could have avoided war in December 2021 with one step: “Ukrainian declaration of neutrality,” she said, “would have prevented the destruction and loss of life."
On 18 February 2022, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) reported that Ukraine had ramped up artillery attacks along the civil war Line of Contact. (Since 2014, NATO-armed Ukraine and neo-Nazis thugs had killed thousands of ethnic Russians in the Donbass.)
21 February 2022, Russia captured a Ukrainian soldier, killed five others, as they crossed over the border into Rostov. The Kremlin learned the invasion of Donetsk city was imminent. Three days later, with about 100,000 troops, Russia launched its “Special Military Operation” - not a "full scale invasion."
Putin did not wake up on 24 February and decide, “I think I’ll invade eastern Ukraine today," nor was the US campaign to expand NATO into Ukraine a last-minute maneuver. US State Department documents show Ukraine’s future membership was discussed as early as 1994.
Citing the UN principle, “Responsibility to Protect,”
#Russia intervened in the eight-year Donbass conflict after all prospects for diplomacy had failed. Putin had learned growing up in the tough streets of St. Petersburg, “If you know there’s going to be a fight, throw the first punch.”