they had been aggressing before that too; they put missiles in Turkey first, originally causing the Cuban missile crisis -- then refused to ratify the already-agreed-on Salt II treaty (put doi# into sci-hub), while instead Bzrezinski and Carter financed and trained terrorists and warlords who r*pe children and throw acid at schoolgirls directly to create terror and crises in Communist Afghan which bordered SSRs with which there were many exchange and education programs so that they could push the USSR into a "vietnamese quagmire,"; which eventually grew into such a catastrophic organized international-terrorist-fueled civil war scenario that after the DRA had already asked for assistance 20 times and was being rebuffed even as Soviet advisors and ambassadors were murdered with their families by extremists, the Soviets eventually decided to choose what they deemed the "least bad" option and invaded. (China also helped the muhajideen terrorists, including facilitating CIA/ISI training camps near Xinjiang, and created their own blowback for that. Post-split Chinese foreign policy was UNHINGED and SHITTY DOO DOO ASS and I'm thankful they wised up into non-intervention).

and then after all that played out and the US backed the Yeltsin coup where he abolished the parliament impeaching him and shelled the building killing hundreds, the US continued as being the ones as you said been the aggressor. It was them backing out of every missile treaty one by one, after and while and remilitarizing Europe and expanding ever eastward in a move sponsored directly by arms dealers of whom Democrats are beneficiary, being heavily patronized and vice-versa by those same death-merchants. .

The US and its EU vassal-cartel and their NATO military vanguard-of-neocolonialism for which IMF and World Bank are the preeminent institutional entities of, have always been the aggressor. It's so bizarre western media calls Putin like he's an unhinged megalomaniac who only knows violence when in reality he's an incorrigible neolib who had deluded himself and others for decades the US might ever listen to their concerns and be anything different than a relentless aggressor. And Putin had been an incorrigible moderate against most of the Duma (from Communists to rightwingers) during all of this Ukraine stuff since 2014. If they had gone in in 2014 and said "absolyutna nyet" after the nazi-spearheaded coup, which many had pushed for and continued to over the years, there might have been 1000-2000 dead at most and none of this shit would have become so horrendous. But instead he only pulled the trigger on Crimea because of the Black Sea Fleet and otherwise continually blocked the Duma's demands, and dragged feet on and undermined the DNR/LNR demands and requests, instead letting them get shot and tortured and murdered and smashed out of Odessa and Kherson and Mariupol by Nazis and suffer a bunch of awful political struggles and protracted violence and shellings; while the west NATO empire openly armed and trained more and more of the overtly anti-Russian military and fascist groups to be a battering ram for the largest most violent empire that has ever existed, the USA.

He stood as an incorrigible collaborationist moderate pushing for agreements and compromises with the west, who anyone with a brain could tell was never intending on following through with any of it BECAUSE THEY WERE THE DRIVING FORCE OF IT ALL GOING THIS WAY IN THE FIRST PLACE; while allowing not only the arming and training of the openly anti-Russian military and militias operating in Ukraine to kill Russians; but also allowing the corrupted growth of an entire generation, now today old-enough to fire a gun, have the most formative years of their upbringing guided through Azov and C-14's state-funded Nazi "education centers," Nazi "community organizations," and Nazi-youth military summer-camps; that if Putin was half the comicbook villain western liberals think he is, or if he had just remembered his Soviet education

his dialectical- and historical materialist education which he undoubtedly got; he would not have held such delusions and the world wouldn't be teetering over nuclear oblivion like this with so many pointless tens-to-hundreds-of-thousands dead and half a million wounded, и за что? зачем?