Anyway, I wasn't trying to disagree with you or anything. Just adding my own clarification around the context from some of the other discussions I've had on this topic. See, for example, macanchex's reply to my topic, which places all of the blame for this war on Western powers.

The dramatic developments we are witnessing today have causes that we knew about but refused to see:

    on the strategic level, the expansion of NATO (which we have not dealt with here);
    on the political level, the Western refusal to implement the Minsk Agreements;
    and operationally, the continuous and repeated attacks on the civilian population of the Donbass over the past years and the dramatic increase in late February 2022.

This is an Orwellian distortion of language.

Expansion can be interpreted in a literal sense or a metaphorical one. Organizations expand in a metaphorical sense. When we say that a company "expands" by by entering a new market or hiring new talent, we know that this is metaphorical.

NATO is a defensive pact with voluntary membership, but by calling it "expansionist," Russia plays a trick where it evokes the literal sense of expand to transform NATO into the aggressor. It seems fairly plain to me that the real expansionists would be the ones who have literally, physically expanded into a neighboring country by annexing Crimea. The expansionists would be the ones who are currently occupying territory in three foreign nations against the will of those nations' governments.

> and operationally, the continuous and repeated attacks on the civilian population of the Donbass over the past years and the dramatic increase in late February 2022.

By third party estimates, the civillian casualties in the Russian invasion are about two to three orders of magnitude higher than the civilian casualties in Donbass prior to the invasion. This is like slaughtering an entire village because it contains a single murderer. There is absolutely zero ambiguity about where the moral high ground is here.

This does not even include the fact that any civilian casualties in Donbass were either incidents when counterfiring to russian and separatist shelling, or russian provocations.

We can even see this right now in the war: Russia just randomly shells apartment blocks with Grads, while UA only targets real military targets on Russian soil, like Belgorod fuel depots or Taganrog airfield. Russian propaganda doesn't even try to claim that, at least yet.

A voluntary alliance isn't an imperialist agenda (assuming that the sovereign nations have the opportunity to make a truly voluntary decision, without outside coercion).

In fact, many nations have requested voluntarily to join NATO. Ukraine was one such nation, and wasn't allowed in.

Arguing that Russia should get a veto over which defensive alliances other nations join is a pro-imperialist position. You're taking the view that Russia gets to determine the behavior of other nations, because they are "in its security umbrella". I'm sorry, but that position is inherently untenable for an "anti-imperialist".

It's a coherent position for Russian Nationalists, or for believers in Super Power Imperialism.

He seems to be claiming there wasn't weapons transfer to Donbass, etc when they were initially acting as break away republics. How does he explain MH17? I spent too much time looking at this.

To think that Ukraine was shelling Donbass and "provoking" after what we seen in the last 50 days is truly a mental distortion.

> Anyone who is still pushing more weapons into Ukraine or tells Kiev to prolong the war is putting more Ukrainian lives at risk for zero potential gain.

Surely life under Russia will be blissful with no Ukrainians harmed.