I'm not related to the rest of the conversation, but the "NATO expansion" talking point is so egregious at this point that it's impossible to pass by and ignore.

> NATO wants to put missiles on their doorstep.

No they didn't. Joining NATO was never really on the table for Ukraine, because by the time there was political willpower, Russia had already created enough territorial disputes to prevent it from even being a hypothetical possibility. Not only was Ukraine never close to being in NATO, but you talk of "putting missiles" somewhere, which is like five steps further than that.

If they cared so much about NATO, you'd think they would've done something in 2004, no? When all the Baltic states were added into NATO, putting their borders 100km away from St. Petersburg and about as far from Moscow as Ukraine's borders are? And yet nothing happened...

Nothing was happening between NATO and Ukraine before full-scale war started. Russia could've kept the situation as it was indefinitely. They chose to go to war not because they were desperate and terrified of something, but because they thought they could win the war really easily.

Then when their war led to Finland joining NATO, Russia's official response was to look mildly displeased and forget about it soon after. Because they never cared about those borders. Those borders were close to them for close to 20 years then.

> US state department had been plotting the Zelensky revolution

The "Zelensky revolution"? The one where Zelenskyy suddenly hopped off the stage and became a US-backed revolutionary leader? Not knowing that he was elected a full government change after the revolution, all the way in 2019, shows that you know nothing of Ukrainian politics despite being so confident about it.

There's a weird consensus between Americans who really love and really hate their country that the US has its hands in all the cookie jars, and that nothing in the world can happen without America's involvement. Ukraine has a student protest that snowballs out of control due to escalations, resulting in the country preferring democratic countries over the bright future of becoming a Belarus-like slave state? Must have been the US. Sure, this definitely was something the US liked a lot, but the connections to it are a lot more tenuous than things the US did meddle in. Stop trying to pretend that Ukrainians have no agency and are just a cardboard cutout with Uncle Sam standing behind it. The US has a lot of power, and it has access to lots of variables they can tweak to try and influence the situation, but the primary parties here are Russia and Ukraine.