Why are you conflating and confusing everything?

Belarus built the bases. Belarus’ president negotiated a deescalation between Wagner and Russian military. The guy tried to do the same for Ukraine and Russia since 2015 — the agreements are called Minsk I and II for a reason. Belarus also demanded their nukes back, they never made any “Budapest Memorandum”. Why do you ignore the agency of Belarus, and conflate it with Russia building bases for PMCs in Belarus?

If Ukraine trains its armed forces in US and UK, its military uses NATO weaponry follows the detailed planned and directions of NATO generals, do you say it has no agency and is just a puppet of NATO? If not, why apply the double standard to Belarus being a puppet of Russia? Saying Yanukovich or Lukashenko is just a Putin puppet is the kind of caricature and oversimplification that is the systemic problem. When they asked for the nukes back, what was Russia supposed to do? Or when Assad asked Russia for help, what were they supposed to do, it was their agreed duty to defend their ally.

Next, you conflate Donbas and Crimea. Russians had “little green men” in Crimea. They were allowed to have 25K troops there, according ti an agreement with Ukraine, but the “little green men” is just another red herring. They didn’t shoot or kill anyone. They are ENTIRELY different than the Antimaidan protests across Ukraine including cities like Odessa and Kharkiv, and also different than the uprisings in Donbas. What happened there is similar to what happened in the Judaic wars where Zealots won a few battles in the north and then came to Jerusalem to get everyone to fight the Romans, and burned their provisions. Strelkov and Motorola are similar to Manuel Norriega or contras or “moderate rebels” in Syria. This is the despicable stuff imperialist countries do, which I condemn in an evenhanded way, but you only care when Russia does it.

So no, “little green men” has NOTHING AT ALL to do with Russia having “boots on the ground” in Donbas. Russia didn’t invade Donbas in 2015. What happened was a proxy war with Russia arming the pro-Russian militias (many of whom were USSR sympathizers) and CIA + NATO training and arming anti-Russian militias (many of whom were nazi sympathizers). It is almost a textbook definition of a proxy war, just like we have had all throughout the cold war, and it should have been settled with the Minsk II Agreements. We all know how these proxy wars end up ravaging a country once they escalate, and that’s why it is so crucial to give diplomacy and peace a chance.

The fact that you think what half the world believes is merely “Russian talking points” shows that you are in a bubble. Outside NATO countries, outside the bubble, people largely think what I am saying. Even within the NATO countries, people are saying it. I mean I was literally in Latvia this past week - Riga and Liepaja - and spoke to cab drivers and others. I was struck by how many people speak Russian there and also how many people tell me (unprompted) the same things I’m saying here.

And even in the USA nearly all the experts whose job it was to know these things all predicted and warned for decades that NATO expansion would lead to exactly this outcome, but just like we can’t stop an AI apocalypse, we can’t stop the military industrial complex. They’ll just race to the precipice.

Look, if you believe this is about Ukraine — Hillary was just as eager to make a no-fly zone in Syria if it meant she could engage Putin. Everyone told her she was risking WW3 since 2013 but she doubled down on it. She would rather fight Putin than work together to eliminate Jihadists. The country was overrun by jihadist terrorists spilling over from Iraq, using our own weapons and vehicles. But no one even dared question that at all, they just assumed it was extreme incompetence, not a concerted effort to destabilize Syria. The calculus is simple: if they are our geopolitical foes, they are dictators and “must go”. If they are our allies (eg Saudis) then we do the mirror opposite and call it “supporting our allies in the region”.

The country doesn’t matter to these hawks — the epicenter of escalation from proxy war to WW3 could have just as easily been Syria instead of Ukraine, if Hillary had been elected. Obama was attacked on 60 mins that he is “letting Putin lead in Syria” and had to defend himself by saying they are making Russia commit their army to “barely hold together by a thread their last ally in the region”. All the while being ravaged by hordes of sunni jihadists with American weapons, who themselves are the result of CIA funding and training. You don’t see the problem here? Hillary says it herself — WE create the problems ourselves, we fund terrorists and even get blowback, but it’s all worth it because we get to stick it to the Russians. It is the same as what Brezhinski and others said. I don’t know why you only think there is Russian propaganda, while the CIA is “free to train and arm whoever they want.”

Still not convinced? Read this, I wrote it months before any Russian invasion:

https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=349