I went to your article. I'm surprised the Medium police have not pulled it down.

While Ukraine has not come to terms with its history of WW2, neither has Russia. While Ukraine has its share of squarehead political forces today, so too does Russia. Russia is not a saintly country by any means.

Crimea is Russian because it kicked out most of the previous population. It had no need conquer Crimea, but Crimea was conquerable.

I lived in Czechoslovakia shortly after the Iron Curtain fell. While the Russians were gone, I could see several examples of how Russians put fear into these occupied citizens, just to remind them of who is really in charge:

https://medium.com/politically-speaking/russian-like-soldiers-in-your-hometown-936e1128b13a

For whatever the faults the west may have, the Czechs and Slovaks do not want the Russians back. I can only conjecture that the Ukrainians feel the same way.

I have said the main reason for the invasion is that Ukraine was making moves to take the Ukrainian economy away from the Russian oligarchs. All that other stuff, some of which you have mentioned in your article, is just smokescreen to justify that invasion on some kind of moral ground.

Like many analysts who are much smarter than I, I was predicting the fall of Kiev in a month. Whatever training or military aid the west had given Ukraine prior to February 2022 would not have been enough. Nearly all of us were surprised. The resolve of the Ukrainian people was higher than expected. The ineptness of the large Russian military was not apparent at the time.

Had that invasion succeeded, I believe that Russia would have continued its expansion to reclaim its historical territories, from Finland to Bulgaria. And NATO would not have lifted a finger to stop that expansion.

History has many examples of a dominant ethnic group oppressing other ethnic groups. This is part of human nature. While Russians have utilized this human nature to vault their tribes over others, they are not alone.

Trying to take away blame from Russians is not going to solve much.