A BRIEF HISTORY OF RUSSIA’S WAR AGAINST UKRAINE

During the winter of 2013 to 2014, pro-European protests in Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv swelled into a revolution calling for the removal of Viktor Yanukovych, the country’s pro-Russia president at that time. Weeks after Yanukovych’s ousting in February 2014, Russia invaded and seized Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula...

The Donbas war began on April 6, 2014, when Russian security agents and special forces troops spearheaded an unconventional military offensive that spawned two Russian-controlled breakaway territories in eastern Ukraine — the Donetsk People’s Republic, or DNR, and the Luhansk People’s Republic, or LNR...

Through a campaign of weaponized propaganda, Moscow painted both its Crimean invasion and the ensuing conflict in the Donbas as spontaneous uprisings prosecuted by disaffected Russian-speaking Ukrainians who opposed the pro-Western “Revolution of Dignity” in 2014. When a Russian surface-to-air missile deployed to the Donbas war zone shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July 2014, killing all 298 passengers and crew on board, Russia’s media apparatus went into overdrive, spreading fabricated stories to divert blame onto Ukraine and the US....

For Ukraine, the situation was dire in the summer of 2014. With Russia’s unconventional offensive on the march in the Donbas, many worried about a full-scale invasion...

At that time, the Ukrainian military was a ragtag force, able to field only about 6,000 combat-ready soldiers. Equipment reserves had been depleted by decades of plundering by corrupt oligarchs and arms dealers...

By July of 2014, Kyiv’s forces had retaken 23 out of the 36 districts in the Donbas previously under Russian control.

With its army on the march, it looked like Kyiv might be able to take back all the territory it had previously lost to Russia and its proxies. In August, however, Russia outright invaded eastern Ukraine with thousands of its own troops bolstered by armor and artillery.

Nolan Peterson is a senior editor for Coffee or Die Magazine and the author of Why Soldiers Miss War. A former US Air Force special operations pilot and a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Nolan is now a conflict journalist and author whose adventures have taken him to all seven continents.

Ukraine had no military to speak of when Putin invaded Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.

They built up their military and turned to NATO AFTER Putin invaded.

Ukraine was not a military threat to Russia, and the claim by Putin that his intervention in Ukraine has been because of a threat to Russia from Ukraine or from NATO using Ukraine as a missile base or Bio-weapons or Ukrainian nuclear weapons is all propaganda designed to create domestic support within Russia for his aggression.

It was the prospect of Ukraine joining the EU that was a threat to Putin's vision of a pan Russo-Slavic empire ruled by Moscow of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.

If Ukraine joined the EU and made the same kind of economic progress that Poland made and reduced the corruption in the country that would have been intolerable for Putin.

Peterson’s moment of clarity came on Sunday at the NATO base in Yavoriv where he nearly died. Instead of staying on and reporting on the aftermath, he fled.

Now he’s in Kiev admiring how much food/supplies are stored there...never mind the Ukie armies in the south/east are being decimated.

That is quite a spin considering that region in Ukraine was and is pro-Russian and the people there didn't want to be under the rule of a government that came to power illegally after the Maidan revolution.

The Ukrainian nationalists, including the neo-Nazi element, could have lived in peace and controlled most of the country if they had abided by the Minsk Agreement Ukraine signed and let the DPR and LPR go their own way.

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