>>>>Dude, I'm Ukrainian

Well, your country being invaded by an incompetent horde of brutal assholes surely influences your ability to dispassionately assess the strategic situation, and the motivations of said assholes. I can understand it's hard to hear that the people slaughtering your countrymen aren't 100% at fault...more like 95% at fault, with the other 5% being sustained multi-decade provocation from....the country that is giving you every weapon imaginable to repulse the murderers. But Ukrainians are dying due to fallout from a chain of events initiated 15+ years ago, by DC think tankers with an irrational willingness to antagonize a Great Power on the opposite side of the planet.

>>>>They were discussing who would they have preferred to work with in future Ukrainian government. What exactly is so scandalous here in your opinion?

I would argue it wasn't a conversation of "wouldn't it be nice if" but them making decisions about who would be the leadership of Ukraine, which isn't something that should be decided by US State Department officials.

>>>With your background you should understand better than most how modern propaganda works.

These days we call it "information operations" and "psychological operations".

>>>> People who participated still waiting for they paycheck, where do they apply?

Don't be naive. The bottom-rank locals in any revolution don't get a paper trail directly back to the US government. Most people who are getting suitcases of US dollars have enough sense to keep their mouths closed about where it came from. $50,000 from an American who "works for an NGO" so the Maidan protesters can buy supplies -> $1,000 spent on supplies "with their own money" and $49,000 quietly pocketed.

>>>>You state they are afraid of sudden decapitating tank blitz on Moscow... that will be preceded by 30 days of bombardment? How does that make sense? Won't Russia just retaliate with nukes?

In order to retaliate with nukes, their nuclear deterrent and MAD has to be credible. Which brings us back to why they were so pissed off in 2007 about ABMs in Eastern Europe: putting an ABM umbrella on their doorstep means you can shoot down their nukes (boost-phase intercept profile), which means the conventional invasion of Russia can proceed with impunity.

>>>>Russia creating "Eurasian-spanning power bloc"? With what?

The Russians would be the western anchor of a military and economic partnership largely led by China. Putin and Xi have been orchestrating such for years.[1][2] The Russian military and Russian natural resource exports would be the main leverage against nations west of the Urals.

>>>>Dude, they have been getting their asses kicked by bunch of poorly-trained Ukrainians with some outdated stuff

Which has left a ton of military professionals flabbergasted. The Russians have demonstrated an embarrassing level of incompetence from the highest ranks to the lowest, and I don't think even people with a low opinion of the Russian military anticipated this poor of a performance. Well-respected combat veterans have held the Russians in pretty high regard since at least the Battle of Debaltseve. [3][4][5] But the Emperor has no clothes, so to speak. Their industry already wasn't able to sustain their grand military ambitions, but it certainly can't replace their losses, compensate for the brain drain, compensate for sanctions, etc....So the Russians are feeding themselves into a Ukrainian woodchipper, basically taking them out of the "Great Game" for at least the next 10 years, if not 20-40.

>>>>Russians seem to be doing very well in sabotaging their natural resources business empire

I think Putin expected the natural gas stranglehold on Germany to keep the Europeans on the sidelines. Not anticipating the severity of economic sanctions and the rapidity of Europe switching to alternative energy suppliers is just one of his MANY egregious miscalculations before undertaking his invasion.

>>>>Fully eliminate nuclear threat... by provoking nuclear war with biggest adversary?

1) I think the policy wonks wanted to salami-slice and encircle Russia until they could get good-enough ABMs in place. Putin has reacted kinetically before that could be completed. 2) Yes, whoever is sticking to the agenda of antagonizing Russia is an asshole, gambling the lives of the whole planet.

>>>>Aren't analyst supposed to analyze military capabilities and scenarios objectively? I mean, how stupid can they be?

I don't think most intel analysts are stupid, just human. On the contrary, the most consistent problem I see with them is the same Dunning-Kruger Effect seen on HN: they are intelligent, but think they are smarter/more knowledgeable about certain specific domains than they actually are, and come to egregiously bad conclusions due to underestimating the gaps in their knowledge base.

>>>>Irrational attachment or people who produce and sell the necessary equipment lobbying for that?

Both. But in the F-35's case definitely the blame lies mostly with the Marine Corps. Our demand for VTOL capability compromised the kinematics of the entire platform.[6]

>>>>When US invaded Iraq or Afghanistan they didn't try to annex the lands.

The US approach to imperial domination doesn't rely on "painting the map" directly. We dominate people's central banks and financial systems instead.[7][8] It's all about maintaining the Petrodollar/global reserve currency system, which allows us to essentially tax the entire planet and give every country monopoly money in return. Monopoly money which we also spend on our gigantic military, which enforces the acceptance of said monopoly money.

>>>>(ethnic cleansings, forced deportations, annexations)

I'd say these are business as usual for brutal sociopathic Soviet-trained leadership, and also the only way that Russia has any hope of controlling the vast territory it's trying to bite off from Ukraine: get rid of all of the locals. Then there is no one to support an insurgency, no one to vote the "wrong" way during referendums, etc...

>>>>Do you think there was any realistic scenario where NATO could have accepted Ukraine with significant chunks of the country occupied by Russians since 2015 even without the invasion? And you think Russia didn't understand that Ukraine was not going to be accepted any time soon?

That would be the case if NATO adhered to the letter of its own laws/documents/policies. But I think the Russians don't consider that possibility as something they want to bet their future on. It would mean putting the future safety of the Russian State entirely in the benevolent hands of NATO decision-makers. I think after the 2007 ABM dispute, any perception of NATO benevolence in Putin's mind was shattered. Maybe we'll carve out a special exception for Ukraine. Maybe we'll re-write NATO's Articles to remove the "no existing territorial disputes" clause. Or maybe the US would just bully/bribe every other member into voting "Yes" to Ukraine. These sound unbelievable to most Westerners, but they are probably all realistic risks in the brain of a KGB field agent. So after Ukraine's constitutional amendment in 2019 [9], Putin probably decided to seize the initiative. If he spent a few months figuring out exactly how to respond, that would put him Summer-Fall of 2019....planning to execute an early 2020 full annexation. Then COVID hit, and Putin waited until the global pandemic was stabilized before setting in motion staging his troops for invasion (Fall 2021 with a planned January invasion)...then he had to delay AGAIN after Big Daddy Xi told him "Don't fuck up my Olympics with your war." So world events may have delayed a Spring 2020 invasion until Spring 2022, which means we're actually witnessing the fastest possible turn-around time for a Russian offensive, assuming Ukraine's amendment was the straw that broke the camel's back. It also means Putin may have planned an invasion while notoriously-anti-interventionist Trump was in office, but ended up getting puppet-on-warmonger-strings Biden in the White House by the time everything was ready. shrug Entirely supposition on my part.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/russia-and-chin...

[2] https://jamestown.org/program/russia-and-china-a-mutually-ex...

[3] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/pentagon-fig...

[4] https://warontherocks.com/2016/05/fixing-nato-deterrence-in-...

[5] https://www.theamericanconservative.com/facing-the-facts-of-...

[6] https://medium.com/war-is-boring/fd-how-the-u-s-and-its-alli...

[7] http://iskra-news.info/news/segodnja_nochju_iz_borispolja_v_...

[8] https://www.globalresearch.ca/libya-all-about-oil-or-all-abo...

[9] https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-president-signs-constitution...