> The war in Ukraine does not fit the definition of proxy war that you provided.

I haven't provided one, Wikipedia has. I will quote it and add emphasis:

A proxy war is an armed conflict between two states or non-state actors, one or both of which act at the instigation or on behalf of other parties that are not directly involved in the hostilities.

The non-state actors, as I pointed out, were, respectively:

1) The Right Sector, Azov Battallion, Dnipro and others, which were armed and trained by the CIA, as well as NATO members and allies (e.g. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-07-09/ty-article/ri...)

2) The rebels in Donetsk and Luhansk, made up of local militias. They wished Donetsk and Luhansk regions to be absorbed by Russia early on, but Russia refused and told them to deal with Kyiv. The Minsk II agreements had as their aim guaranteeing a degree of autonomy WITHIN Ukraine, and that's what Russia wanted. Strelkov reports being disappointed by that.

In short, non-state actors formed paramilitary groups, one side received support from Russia and the other side received support from US, UK and other NATO members. Do you understand what I'm talking about?

This is how proxy wars form. Wikipedia goes on to say that large nuclear powers (USA and USSR, for instance) did this all the time during the cold war -- instead of engaging each other directly, each side would train rebels inside a country, against the other side. Each promised that they'd defeat the other and take over the country (e.g. Viet nam, Korea, etc. etc.) The sectarian violence is exacerbated and it tears a country apart, and often leads it into much larger conflicts as other countries double down and funnel weapons into it.

For example, KGB trained the PLO, against Israel and Jordan, after they entered the Western sphere of influence (previously, Stalin supported Israel because it was going to be a socialist country in the middle east, and largely was, with the kibbutzes and Labor party etc. but when they switched, Khrustchev and others started training "liberation organizations".) USA had an entire school devoted to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_f...

Anyway, proxy wars have been happening all over the place. I gave an example of a proxy war happening in Yemen, between Iran and Saudi Arabia. It's a very common scenario and there is nothing new about the Ukraine war except it's in Europe and White Lives Matter More (TM) + Russia can be blamed and surrounded / contained. So this war is in the news whereas e.g. Yemen is not, despite being a far greater humanitarian catastrophe than in Ukraine.

You've been arguing with civility, so please let's not be obtuse on purpose. You see what I mean now, right? Ukraine has been a staging ground for a proxy war, and eventually it turned into a "regular war" as you call it, perhaps it will become a world war. I hope not.

(To be clear: your examples of Australia and Iran totally miss the mark. Read the wikipedia article, and try to steelman my argument before strawmanning it.)

>> Shots were fired and people died.

Alright, fair enough, you may know more about what really happened than what is available in official sources. But the extent of the violence was much smaller than, say, the American Revolution, or Bangladesh war of independence, or any of the dozens or hundreds of independence movements that were a lot more bloody.

> Latvian SSR was a fake government set up in 1940 by the USSR and it ceased to exist in 1991 along with the USSR itself.

What makes a government fake? History is written by the winners, but if a government allows people to elect their representatives, then it has some legitimacy. I sympathize with people's desire for complete sovereignty, but sometimes they have to settle for a degree of autonomy (as I mentioned, Hong Kong, Catalonia, etc.) and the vast majority of civilians prioritize health and safety over flags and geopolitical aspirations. I think it's obscene to volunteer people far away for the meat grinder just so you can enjoy a flag on a map for 50 years. Look at a time-lapse video of Europe to show how provincial these aspirations are. It's only recently that this myth arose that the borders of nation-states will be enshrined forever, now that UN is here.

> Latvia never joined the USSR in the first place.

By that standard, the Kingdom of Hawaii never joined the USA in the first place, and Hawaii currently has a fake government. Would you agree, if you applied a consistent standard? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overthrow_of_the_Hawaiian_King...

I just want you to recognize that the same exact situation can be viewed differently depending on what country is doing it.

> Might as well say that the Poles joined Nazi Germany in 1939 and then in 1945 Nazis "allowed" them to secede when Wehrmacht retreated from Poland. Utter nonsense.

No, the Wehrmacht retreated because they were being decimated and killed by an enraged Red Army. Soviets lost 30 million people (largely due to Stalin's incompetence, btw.) Anyway, that is not at all the same as the situation in 1991, which involved far less brutality, genocide and killing. You may be able to show some limited amount of it, but NOWHERE NEAR your example. It's in a totally different league. Find a better example.

Perhaps a closer example would be the end of the British Raj in India, or the British Mandate in Palestine. They also involved far less violence. However -- and this is the cautionary tale -- it left behind a vacuum that led to civil war in which many people were killed or fled to become refugees. My point is that you have to compare apples to apples and look at similar situations around the world, in order to draw general conclusions and advocate for prescriptions.

> In fact, USSR created fake governments for every country they intended to enslave.

Literally that's what ever empire throughout history has done, including USA. And you use the word "enslave" very liberally, I might add. Have you seen what real slavery looks like? People going about their day under a different flag and not having total political sovereignty is not slavery. Tibet is not enslaved by China, in fact China argues that Tibet's own government was far more slave-owning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom_in_Tibet_controversy

On the other hand, capitalists often did end up enslaving people. Here for example is USA literally setting up a fake government and enslaving Haiti: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_occupation_of_Ha...

One could argue that many places which the Communists "enslaved" actually liberated women, freethinkers and others, and allowed them to go get an education, they built universities, brought electricity, etc. I'm not saying communists taking over was all-good, but many people were thankful (e.g. in Uzbekistan, etc.) and also minorities that were oppressed. You have to realize that these countries are made up of many different groups.

> The same handwriting has more recently continued in Abkhazia (fake government created in Georgia), Transnistria (Moldova), and now in Ukraine too.

Yes, I agree, and I actually don't consider it a bad thing. People who live in Abhazia want to have their own republic, too. So did Crimea, they overwhelmingly voted to SECEDE from Ukraine, back in 1991: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Crimean_sovereignty_refer... ... whereas the vote to join Ukraine was only 54%. We also can see similar things here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Kurdistan_Region_independ... and here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Catalan_independence_refe...

The thing is that UN is composed of COUNTRIES, and they don't want little pieces to fly off. So you have a weird double-standard whereby a country like Russia can bomb its own region (Chechnya) and raze its capitol city to the ground, or China can extrajudicially kidnap and lock up 1 million Uyghurs in internment camps, and UN says very little because it's "an internal matter". I find that to be obscene. But likewise when Ukraine's government uses cluster bombs in Donetsk: https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/20/ukraine-widespread-use-c... ... since 2014 they did it, HRW also reported it last week (!) https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/07/06/ukraine-civilian-deaths-... and USA just announced a couple days ago that it will send more cluster munitions (banned by most civilized countries) to Ukraine's government to use.

Make no mistake - these munitions will be almost exclusively killing civilians in Ukraine, NOT Russia. So it shows how much USA cares about Ukrainians: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66144153

Surely you can see that there are real problems for the Ukrainian civilian population, and the counteroffensive has now resorted to kidnapping men off the street and shanghaing them into the meat grinder with very little training. It's time to bring it to an end.

And look, here is how US corporations benefit... it's frankly a bit insane:
https://www.facebook.com/jaketran.io/videos/9654289727945826...

So yes, I understand the wish to be politically sovereign, but the majority of civilians have other priorities and frankly I think being part of the same federation, (USA, USSR, etc.) is far better and more stable and peaceful for them, than all this endless fighting and war. Countries in Sub-Saharan Africa got left behind most other countries for centuries, because they lacked any serious empires. Empires may suck during the conquering phase, but once they have formed, it's better to keep the stability. The neighboring regions stop fighting each other, and devote resources to working together. They speak the same language, have common roads, share education centers, etc. Throughout history, empires have helped move civilization forward. When people say that "paper / gunpowder / etc. was invented in china" or "algebra / chess was invented by Arabs" etc. what they really mean is that someone in a giant freaking empire invented it, and then it spread. When they talk about Pax Mongolica or Pax Romana, it was a net benefit to many: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3x0ae1/was_t...