That is of course the excuse Putin wants everyone to swallow, but no matter how bad NATO has been and how that whole paradigm probably should be reimagined, one cannot ignore the decades of reporting, first hand accounts and witnesses of what's going on in the various oblasts and republics of Russia, and I'm not just talking about Siberia.

It's this idea that all westerners are stupid and disconnected enough to not know, but we have ex-pat Russians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Moldovans, Polish, etc, etc.

This was never about NATO. That is a scapegoat. It is the resurgence of Russian emperialism, the classic KGB subversion and purile egomanic vanity. If they wanted Ukraine away from NATO, they could've instead relied on soft diplomacy and probably even have gotten there. This was as all about taking sovereign territory from another nation state for strategic purposes, by any means necessary.

Now consider Ukrainians, knowing all this, because again, they are not stupid neither, would they just lay down knowing fully well what will happen to their country?

Mf, they stay in this - for the survival of their culture and history, because cultural genocide will be just the first in a long line of atrocities that lie in wait if they should lose.

I put my chips on the Ukrainians, even that they become one of these perpetual conflict countries. But hopefully not. Hopefully they'll take back the east and also Crimea and maybe even shake up the power dynamics in Russia for the better.