Asklemmy

Discussions with people like you, even if we may not have the same opinion, are the reason I am glad my instance is still federated with you guys because if I didn’t have you, I’d feel trapped in the echo chamber.

This is refreshing to read, thank you very much! And this is why people should struggle to preserve federation with us. I'm sure your instance admins may be bothered if an event catalyzes polemics. When the war in Ukraine started, a lot of instances broke contact with us because we presented different points of view. But most of us ground our opinions on facts. Unfortunately not everyone has the same temperament to deal with different points of view, and this "denouncing" may happen from some users, but that happens anywhere, a whole instance cannot be blamed because of a few users. In our case, it's not a systematic phenomenon, like some right-wing and fascist instances.

Also thanks for taking your time to read. A few people dismiss what I write because I'm very detailed in my answers, but imo complex topics demand complex answers, otherwise we are left with a distorted picture. I try my best to be concise and capture the essence of the things we're discussing. That said, allow me to make some comments on your response. To be clear, I don't want to "convince" you nor anyone else, for me we are just sharing our worldviews here, simply to pass time or something hehe.

But the way I see it every aggressive Russian action has further catalyzed it. From Crimea to Donbass up until the SMO and the various crimes against humanity that were committed.

I'm skeptical of the Russian claims that they are trying to protect the Russians living in Ukraine. Russia is a capitalist state, and the war obviously has bourgeois interests involved. The Ukrainian fascists have harassed Russian nationals inside Ukraine in the Donbass region for almost 8 years, why did it take Russia that long to intervene if that was the intention? However, as I see it, it was a matter of time a conflict would happen there, and the Russians attacked preemptively as a legitimate matter of national security.

Ukraine had a government which didn't treat Russia as the devil and had a comprehensive partnership with the country until 2014, when a coup with full support from US politicians, including John McCain, suddenly changed everything. For decades Ukraine had an economic, cultural, diplomatic and political relationship with Russia, and then after a coup sponsored by Western countries, a regime took an opposite direction of denouncing Russians as the Fourth Reich incarnate. But there were already Ukrainian citizens who profoundly hated Russia, so much so, that the regime received support from the citizens in the Western Ukraine regions.

That country with an explicitly anti-Russian regime since then has been armed, trained, and sponsored by the greatest rivals of Russia, with increasing militarization. For scholars who study Russian foreign policy, such as the United Statesian John Mearsheimer, it was quite obvious Russia would intervene. As early as 2015, he said the actions of the United States would prompt a military intervention from the Russians. If an individual scholar who studies this issue was aware of this, you can be certain the Pentagon generals was aware of that, and this is probably what they wanted in the first place. So the war didn't start in 2022, but in 2014, with blood in the hands of the US.

And furthermore I see NATO’s guarantee to the sovereignty of Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia as a way to prevent Russia from executing further military operations in the future.

Only if you base on the (erroneous) premise that NATO is a "defensive" organization. The atrocious NATO interventions in Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria, Kosovo, and others, leads us to believe this is not the case. They are as aggressive as the Russians, perhaps even more so. And since NATO is led by Europe and the US, I'm pretty sure they couldn't care less about the sovereignty of these countries. So much so that in order to let these countries into the organization, and these countries are desperate to join since their governments fear Russian intervention, they demand many economic and political "reforms" which precisely undermine the sovereignty of these countries::

“We know that right now is not the time for a breakthrough in the open-door policy. And I know the Georgian authorities know that, but they still need to be prepared, to fulfill all the reforms that are needed -- in electoral reform, judicial reform, security, etc.,” [NATO’s special representative] Colomina told RFE/RL in an interview."

They demand the country to change its whole political system before they join NATO. That's not what you'd expect from an organization interested in preserving the sovereignty of any country.