ROFLMAO. Yeah, we had nothing to do with the political situations and regime changes that resulted in the current difficulties with Russia. For instance, expanding NATO right up to the border of Russia, when the fall of the Soviet Union should have caused the automatic disbanding of the alliance. The whole point was that Russians were victims of the Soviet rule as well (which subjected Russians to rule by Georgian and Ukranian dictators, resulting in millions of dead Russians), that we were allied against that perfidious system of government, not Russia itself. Except the government went away and we started being friendly to governments that the Russian minorities in their countries might have had different opinions about. When Ukraine was Russian territory before English was ever spoken in the New World, you are going to have lots of Russians finding their way there. I'm pretty sure Mussorgsky, for example, didn't think he was composing music about the gate of a foreign capital.

So while I too feel bad about what people in Ukraine are going through, I tend to give such expressions of sentiment a side-eye, because there is a definite campaign to sway the US popular opinion in favor of conflict with Russia over the issue. Not that I am remotely suggesting any such intention in your own statement, beyond the literal meaning of your words, especially in the context of the second sentence.

We might not have been involved in directly starting this one, but to whatever degree we are not involved, our ruling class absolutely wants to change that.