I understand that there are people in Ukraine who are more aligned with Russia than EU. However, in democracies, which is a terrible form of government but still the best one we have, the majority wins. In 2013, the parliament of Ukraine overwhelmingly supported the European-Ukrainian association agreement, which is the democratically elected part of the government, and then the Yanukovich government suddenly decided, no, they’re not going to honor this decision. That is clear corruption in Russian direction. I can’t deny there might still be corruption in the government formed after Euromaidan, but it is very clear that in total, the majority of Ukraine supported this.

It’s kind of telling to me how you ignored the part about an invasion being a fine way to solve this problem. Shouldn’t the people within a country solve their internal problems themselves? There was no military invasion by EU/US/NATO into Ukraine to bring it under their control. NATO militarization or membership looked very unlikely… Until the 2014 invasion of Crimea and now the 2022 invasion of the whole of Ukraine.

There is a whole different level between trying to gain influence through trade agreements compared to trying to gain influence by military invasion. Sure, I completely concede that Western governments are trying to get influence over Ukraine. But why do these influence battles have to escalate into a war, don’t you agree that no matter who influences/controls a country, normal people’s lives are only going to get worse with a war than with peace? The invasions of the US to “help” all kinds of people (obviously not the real motivation) are rightfully condemned, why is this invasion any different? The thought of course is, after the war things should be better, but when had this ever been the case? During WW2, yes, but the problems in Ukraine were nowhere close to ethnic cleansing like was seen in the Nazi regime, in fact it is heavily disputed that there were any coordinated aggression against ethnic Russians at all. Only 3 months passed between Euromaidan and the Russian invasion of Crimea. There wasn’t even enough time to properly form a government, nevermind starting a controlled persecution of ethnic Russians (if that even was a plan/possibility, which is highly disputed).

Another thing, why didn’t Russia stop with Donbas if it was only about “saving the Russians” in eastern Ukraine? Why did they go for Kiev immediately in 2022? It is quite clear that this current war was never (at least only) about saving “prosecuted Russians”.