defending Donbass was morally defensible, attacking Ukraine proper was less so.
There is absolutely no scenario in which Russia defends Donbass that the West would not construe as an invasion. The plan for years has been to arm Ukraine to fight Russia. The calculus Russia made was that if they're going to get a whole war, they need to fight a whole war, and that means not limiting themselves to only operating in a tiny segment of Ukraine. That's not a viable path to victory. Morally defensible or not, states are going to use the strategy that will succeed: a fantasy ideal scenario of only being involved in the Donbass could not be successful and so would not have happened. Any intervention in favor of people in the Donbass means a full war is necessary because of the inevitable geopolitical reaction
Crimea was done pretty cleanly in 2014. There might have been verbal denouncements, but there was no military response nor any chance of one. Most of the world unflinchingly just accepted that this presently and historically Russian-majority area eagerly agreed to be Russian.
I'm at least partially in agreement with WWario that it would have been better for Putin to also take at least Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014, to avoid the protracted mess that became of the region.
There is absolutely no scenario in which Russia defends Donbass that the West would not construe as an invasion. The plan for years has been to arm Ukraine to fight Russia. The calculus Russia made was that if they're going to get a whole war, they need to fight a whole war, and that means not limiting themselves to only operating in a tiny segment of Ukraine. That's not a viable path to victory. Morally defensible or not, states are going to use the strategy that will succeed: a fantasy ideal scenario of only being involved in the Donbass could not be successful and so would not have happened. Any intervention in favor of people in the Donbass means a full war is necessary because of the inevitable geopolitical reaction
Crimea was done pretty cleanly in 2014. There might have been verbal denouncements, but there was no military response nor any chance of one. Most of the world unflinchingly just accepted that this presently and historically Russian-majority area eagerly agreed to be Russian.
I'm at least partially in agreement with WWario that it would have been better for Putin to also take at least Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014, to avoid the protracted mess that became of the region.