[labcomputer]

For the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that may have had more to do with Ukraine’s budget and economy of the time: Ukraine had a massive trade deficit with Russia in the 2000’s and early 2010’s, and the government was running a huge deficit.

Faced with cuts to state pensions, Ukraine started using gas from the pipeline which connects Russia to Western Europe, without paying for it. That understandably annoyed Russia (that’s not a justification for war!), who couldn’t turn off gas to Ukraine without also turning it off for their main customers in Western Europe.

These events seemed to have kicked off the norstream pipeline (legal) and invasion of Crimea (illegal).

Here is a contemporary article less than a year before the Crimean invasion: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/29/russia-ukraine...

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kharkiv_Pact#Effects

[reeredfdfdf]

The pipeline thing may have annoyed Russia, but it was the Maidan revolution which resulted in the invasion of Crimea. Russia simply doesn't like having neighbours that aren't its puppets. When Ukrainians got rid of Yanukovych, Ukraine stopped being a Russian puppet, which annoyed Putin very much.

Russia has a long, long history of being mean to its neighbours that choose to pursue independent policy. As an example, Finland and Baltic states have been subject to countless of intentional airspace violations since the collapse of the Soviet Union, even before the Ukrainian war.

[kimixa]

My belief was that many analysts at the time considered that the justification rather than the cause, as alluded to by the Ukraine counter claims in the guardian article.

Similarly, Trump isn't saying he wants to invade Venezuela to distract from domestic issues, but it's all about the "drug boats".