I think it's pretty clear that a whole lot of the current situation is due to miscalculations from both sides of this conflict, in as much as you can call Ukraine a side. I don't really know or understand what caused Russia to act the way it did, but I think it's pretty clear from the actions of their ministry of finance and the central bank, that they did not intend for this to be a broader reckoning with neoliberalism, and the central bank is in fact fighting tooth and nail to protect the neoliberal ideologues in charge of it. I kind of agree with you that Russia probably thought the easternmost parts of Ukraine would greet them as liberators, or at least expected some kind of cooperation from them, which has simply not materialised.

However I have 0 fucking idea why the fuck Ukraine is continuing to fight a war that they are 1) never going to win outright, and also 2) is rapidly depleting the male population, which is going to hamper whatever remains of Ukraine when it inevitably have to rebuild, when a ceasefire is signed. Not to mention all the privatization and destruction of labour power is going to ensure that any gains post-war by Ukraine are going to be hoarded by the ruling class and rather than being used to rebuild infrastructure, is probably going to be used in real estate speculation in Toronto, Vancouver, New York and Los Angeles.

I am sorry but I find the whole mainstream narrative about Russia wanting to “conquer” Ukraine or “force a pro-Russian government” in Ukraine completely laughable. Sure, they would love to, but can they?

Let me remind you that the post-2014 sanctions - the costs of taking Crimea and the downing of MH17 - had completely erased Russia’s post-2000 economic growth, and the post-2009 recovery. Russia’s economy was doing really well (comparatively speaking) until the 2013 Maidan coup and the ensuing Ukrainian civil war, when it was hit especially hard that took nearly 4 years to recover. (Ironic that the 2022 sanctions was a cakewalk compared to what came before that)

Now, do you seriously think that Russia wants to “conquer” Ukraine just to get a piece of land while inviting unprecedented international sanctions against itself, with its oligarchs losing hundreds of billions of their accumulated wealth? This has to assume that Putin is incredibly stupid and completely irrational which I am not ready to accept.

This is not WWI when the European imperialist powers were still carving out their colonies you know? This is an era of super-imperialism where one imperialist power has such pervasive control of the global institutions that it can literally seize the entire foreign reserves of another country and cut them off international transaction overnight and turn them into a pariah state. That Russia survived the current sanctions was a miracle, an exception and definitely not the norm because the US overplayed its hands. There is nothing Russia (or any other country except maybe China) can do to defy the overwhelming economic and financial powers of the US/EU bloc.

You are right, United Russia doesn’t care about the people of Donbass. That’s why there was Minsk - to return Donbass to Ukraine so they can make amends with Europe. At the end of the day, United Russia is a pro-capitalist party that wants closer ties with the EU business regimes and prefers a closer economic relationship with the West. It was the communists who never stopped supporting and aiding the people of Donbass throughout the years.

However, the problem for Russia is that this appeasement had failed. Not only was Ukraine not interested in implementing Minsk, the US continued to arm Ukraine via NATO and building up its military. After meeting with Biden in early 2021, Zelensky - who I remind you was popularly elected to bridge the divide between Russia and Ukraine - began to take a hawkish stance against Russia, which alarmed the Russian government. Rounds of diplomatic efforts ensued but to no avail. Not even two months after the failed Russia-US Summit in June 2021, the US boasted about sending Javelins and Stingers to Ukraine. You cannot say this was not deliberate provocation when Russia has continuously asked for peaceful resolutions to a conflict that is increasingly likely to spiral out of control.

By early 2022, mobilization of Ukrainian armed forces towards the eastern front (Donbass region) and the increased shellings of the area had to spook the Russian leadership. We don’t have the actual details, but it is not hard to imagine how they might very well perceive this as an attempt for a Ukrainian offensive, and felt that a war was inevitable, so a “now or never” moment for them. Either Russia takes Ukraine by surprise (and hopefully force them to stand down), or they themselves will get surprised when the Ukrainians invaded.

With that in mind, it makes sense why Ukraine would continue to fight the war that it knows it was never going to win as CTHlurker has asked - because that was always the plan. The Western imperialists benefited strongly from the war, by 1) weakening Russia, 2) deindustrializing Europe and 3) making huge profits from the energy shortage, military industrial buildup and the privatization of Ukrainian assets. The war was always going to happen.

Personally, I don't find divining the motivation of nation-states to be worthwhile. Trying to guess motivation barely works on people, so why apply this faulty form of analysis to nation-states? Nation-states all have geopolitical interests and will act to pursuit and secure those geopolitical interests weighing between short-term geopolitical interests, medium-term geopolitical interests, and long-term geopolitical interests as well as considering how international affairs have a dialectical relationship with domestic affairs. Some will aim towards setting up win-win solutions while others will not be hesitant in setting up lose-lose solutions if they calculate their rivals would lose more than them. Nation-states also have a history that you can use to predict their current and future behavior. This is also different from motivation to me because each action could have radically different motivations despite having the same external action and impact.

For me, there was never any credible way for Russia to secure western Ukraine nor did any of Russia's actions, even at the beginning of the invasion, point to them thinking they could secure the entirety of Ukraine. Even if the Russians killed Zelensky and installed some Russian puppet at Kiev, there would almost certainly be a provisional government set up in Lviv with effective control of western Ukraine which would be formally recognized by the West and possibly the UN as the real government with de jure territory that completely encompasses Ukraine pre-2014. We all made that joke at the beginning of the war that Zelensky was actually holed up in a bunker at Lviv while pretending he was still in Kiev. Besides being a pro-West anti-Russian stronghold, western Ukraine is also prime insurgency territory. It shares a massive land border with a country that's hostile to Russia (Poland) on top of being mountainous. At best, Russia can either directly occupy or indirectly rule via a Russian puppet everything east of the Dnieper plus Odessa with Odessa being heavily occupied because there's no way a provisional Ukrainian government would give up Odessa and resign to "free Ukraine" being a landlocked country.

As for Putin saying he wants to save the Russian minority in Ukraine, I don't find it particularly compelling in terms of its credibility and relevance. However, when Putin says that the invasion is one of denazification, it is far more compelling to me. When Westerners hear the word "Nazi," they associate it with anti-Semitism, but when someone like Putin hear the word "Nazi," they associate it with anti-Russian. Putin is making a case that Ukraine is not only a fascist regime but a fascist regime that harbors genocidal designs for Russian people and will seek to fulfill those genocidal designs given enough time. A fascist regime will inevitably seek to destroy their designated enemy. If the enemy is internal like trans people and ethnic minorities, the final solution is death camps in order to "purify the nation," but if the enemy is external like a bordering nation, the final solution is war until the external enemy is subdued and turned into an internal one, where they can then be funneled into death camps. We see this happen in the Khmer Rouge where the extermination of Vietnamese minorities living in Cambodia escalated to the Khmer Rouge massacring Vietnamese villagers living on the other side of the Cambodia-Vietnam border, which prompted Vietnam to do another great service to humanity by liquidating the Khmer Rouge.

It's exceedingly in Russia's geopolitical interest that a bordering fascist regime that wants to exterminate Russian people be put down. The fact that said fascist regime is being used as a proxy by NATO with the US's fingerprints all over it tilts it even more heavily towards something that must be taken of sooner rather than later. Putin being an anti-communist piece of shit who constantly steals valor from the Soviet Union while at the same time malding over Lenin doesn't change this fact. Nor does the Russian Federation being a neoliberal hellhole changes this fact. Do you think if the RSFSR was still around, that country would sit on its ass twiddling its thumbs while Ukrainian fascists impose Ukrainianization on its Russian minority and shell Donbass civilians? And if their action is going to be the same as the RF that we are unfortunately stuck with in this shitty timeline, then what's the point of highlighting the deficiencies of the RF?