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No, it is what Russian academics, Russian politicians, Russian vox pops and Russian media keep saying to each other, all the time, consistently.

The Russian inconsistency is about what the propaganda mill pushes to the outside world because they know if everybody knew sbout their MORE THAN 10 YEAR LONG internal conversation around bringing the untermensch of Ukraine back under Kremlin rule, the notion that this invasion ever had anything to do with neo-Nazi taskforces in the separatist regions would be sunk.

For one audience in one week they report that they were scared of NATO, for another audience in another week they peddle the myth that the whole Ukrainian country was infested with Nazis and NATO false flags.

For some audiences their story between December and Mid February was, the Nazi element is confined to the Eastern breakaway oblasts and was a tiny force that would be overwhelmed with 2 days of shock and awe and Russia wasn’t interested in doing anything more than that.

At the same time, their demands to Ukraine were nothing short of complete, total, unconditional surrender and de-armament of the entire Ukrainian country prior to the imposition of a Russian puppet government.

(And the plan circulating on Russian TV and Lukashenko’s evil plan whiteboard was then to go do the same to Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland...)

Of course Russian separatists, agents provocateurs, militants and non-nazis who suffered EITHER at the hands of neo-Nazi taskforces OR Russia’s mercenaries, were collateral damage during smirmishes between other parties (there were also several pro-Kyiv community groups and pro-Moscow separatist community groups that weren’t militarised).

But what went on between 2014 and 2022 was still, in the grand scheme of things, a fairly tame civil war. It was nasty and messy to those directly involved, and both sides had villains and victims, but the numbers involved were very low compared to pretty much every other civil war.

So in order to end one of the leadt bloody civil wars in European history, Russia’s caused the deaths of some 40,000 people in six weeks - including their own conscripts - and most of those deaths have been horrific.

Hmm.

That was NOT defensive, it was NOT civil war. It was the implementation of a deliberate policy of fully invading a neighbor and inflicting maximum damage on its services, infrastructure and people.