• vovchik_ilich [he/him]
    ·
    3 days ago

    We're not drinking any Russian propaganda. Russia did start the war, but as in the case of Oct 7th, history doesn't begin in 2022.

    Russia tried to approach Europe in the past, so much so that there were tanks of Russia joining the EU back in the 2000s, but the US wasn't interested in such a strong Europe so it did its thing and put Europe against Russia. There's been an unnecessary expansion of NATO towards the east, despite the agreements that NATO wouldn't go further east than Poland.

    Since the 2010s, Russia has seen all the countries in its former sphere of influence (Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine...) suffer so-called "color revolutions", i.e., "spontaneous" protests leading to government changes putting these countries against Russian interests. What a coincidence, that protests in eastern Europe such as the Euromaidan lead to changes in government, but protests in the west have no effect! The occupy movement in the US, the Gilets-Jeunes in France, the 15-M in Spain... Huge protests all of them, bigger in some cases than any Maidan, no effect whatsoever in government.

    Russia tried to approach Europe, it wasn't allowed, and then it wasn't allowed either to maintain a sphere of influence in neighbouring countries because of the stronger economic power of the US and EU. And to top it all off, an eastward expansion of NATO. It's a blatant attempt to undermine Russian sovereignty and to make it subservient to US interests. Putin, as proto-fascist as he is, sees this, and sees that Russia is ignored in diplomacy and undermined in the economic, and that the only possibility for Russia to maintain a sovereignty and a sphere of influence, is by force. This is an unfortunate reality of geopolitics: Russia had to either accept subserviency, or to literally fight for its sovereignty, and it chose the latter.

    So yeah, you can both simultaneously understand that Russia is a capitalist country fighting a war to maintain the power of its bourgeoisie, and the fact that the US is the main culprit of this since Russia has tried to collaborate with the west for more than a decade and only seen maidans in response.