Quote (Black XistenZ @ Nov 1 2024 07:37am)
I was referring to a post-2014 situation, when Crimea had already been annexed by Russia and the two major Russian oblasts had broken away from Ukraine. Everyone understood why Russia acted the way it did back in 2014. Which is why the West let them get away with some light, mostly symbolic sanctions. What is less clear is why Russia pulled the trigger on a full-scale invasion of the rest of Ukraine in 2022. They already had what they wanted the most, and the frozen conflict in the Donbass made NATO accession unrealistic anyway.
I mean besides the slow burning civil war, Putin has shown he will take tit for tat retaliation after years of waiting for the right moment. That's precisely what happened with Hillary's campaign- it was a direct line between Hillary interfering in Putin's election, and Putin interfering in Hillary's election- but these events happened many years apart. NATO usurped not only the friendly west of Ukraine but also effectively occupied a lot of the DPR / LPR that has been contested since the hot war began, and even if Putin had control over a lot of the east of Ukraine in the frozen conflict and Obama / Trump / Biden were all hesitant to escalate weapons in Ukraine before the invasion- it was still a huge blow to Russia's sphere of influence, long term access to resources and an unanswered slap to their face.
Maybe Russia would have fought a hot war in Ukraine in 2014 if the geopolitical winds favored it. Maybe Putin needed to get his own house in order, wanted to try his hand at continuing to coerce the baltic states as oil transit countries. And US attempts to undermine this with LNG terminals at first and then just blowing up pipelines later demonstrate that Russia couldn't grip the EU with economic power, so it resorted to military power. I imagine we could point to a whole complicated series of factors for why the invasion waited as long as it did, but there are also plenty of easy reasons to explain why he invaded eventually