[philistine]

Trying to perform something humans do to one another, assigning blame, to a successor state who is very much not human, is the wrong way to look at the thing.

I prefer to see the Russian invasion as the delayed violence from the Soviet Union's breakup. Russian politicians were very much in control of all of Eastern Europe, and the Moscow political class was going to build a political case to try and retake Ukraine by force. That the violence did not happen in 1989 probably prevented nuclear war, and the fact it is happening now and not in 2032 is probably also preventing nuclear war.