The US has kicked Russia around for 30 years. The triumphalist imperial attitude the US government displayed since 1991 is what pushed Russia to where it is. Putin is a kleptocratic autocrat and there are plenty of things to criticize about modern Russia, but this sure as hell isn't one person's fault.

If that were the case, why did the 1974 Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which banned a lot of new technology being sold to the Soviet Union as punishment for the USSR refusing to let observant Jews emigrate, never get repealed? Boris Yeltsin was Bill Clinton's lap dog, doing whatever Clinton asked, and yet even though the borders were open and you could hop on a daily flight to Tel Aviv straight from Moscow, Jackson-Vanik remained. In fact, it was only repealed in 2012, and that was because it was replaced by the Magnitsky Act, which did the EXACT SAME THING as Jackson-Vanik, but with a new name.

If Putin is solely responsible, why did the US purport to help Russia, while secretly sending money and weapons to Islamist Chechen terrorists and then, in an act of rank hypocrisy, tell the Russians they "had to" negotiate a "political settlement" with the Chechens (cf. Madeleine Albright, fucking bitch and piece of shit that she is)? Why did the US saddle Russia with 100% of the Soviet debt?

More importantly, when Putin after 9/11 offered full access to Russian military infrastructure in Central Asia so the US wouldn't be 100% reliant on Pakistan for transit issues, why did the US take advantage of the situation and try to make those bases, like the one in Kyrgyzstan, permanent? Why did the US surround every conceivable border of Russia with military bases and listening posts?

And yes, the US did promise Russia in 1990 that NATO wouldn't expand eastward, even if it was never put on paper. And yet NATO expanded constantly, enveloping almost all of Russia's western neighbors. When Russia asked to join NATO it was refused because it was "too big and destabilizing" to NATO. But don't worry, because NATO is "solely defensive". Tell that to the Serbs.

NATO's purpose was to contain the Soviet Union, and since 1991 it continued to exist to contain Russia. That much was obvious. When it extended an offer to Ukraine and Georgia to join a track to membership, Russia finally had to face facts.

No Russian government - Putin's or otherwise - can ignore the geopolitical realities of Russia. Russia has been invaded from the West countless times, and each time has led to massive loss of life. Whether it was the Poles, the Swedes, the French or the Germans (twice!), Russia learned a few things: (1) holding Crimea is vital to securing its southern flank, (2) holding the east bank of the Dniepr River is vital in the southern half, and (3) controlling the Suwalki corridor in the north is vital.

Russia lost the Suwalki corridor, though the exclave of Kaliningrad helps to neutralize the danger somewhat. However, it lost Crimea and the east bank in 1991.

That's why Putin desperately tried to convince NATO to engage in more substantive dialogue with Russia. This was despite the US invading Iraq in 2003 and canceling all the oil contracts Russia had with Iraq. That caused serious economic harm and no one gave a shit.

Look at what Putin said in Munich in 2007 (see the link - hackers took down the kremlin.ru domain where the original speech is listed in full). It is telling. It's when he started to draw some lines because he realized that he was being ignored and encircled.

Putin's major point was simple: the OSCE and other organizations talk about collective security, but NATO is organizing collective security at the expense of Russia. True collective security includes Russia.

He was ignored. Furthermore, it has been proven that the US encouraged the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the 2005 Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, in each case ostensibly to support "democracy" but really to put "our guy" in charge. In Kyrgyzstan it was because the government wanted the US to leave the Manas airbase. Akaev was replaced by Bakiev, a US puppet. Then Putin got rid of him a few years later and Kyrgyzstan finally told the US to leave Manas.

This is all part of the sordid workings of US diplomacy, where we fuck with countries for our own purposes (not that I fault us for doing it when it's really actually important, just that we do it far too often).

In Ukraine, we upset a tenuous balance that had been built by Kuchma between the pro-Russian East Ukraine and the rabid anti-Russian West Ukraine, which was fed propaganda about the evils of Russians from their relatives in Canada and the US (most of whom ended up there in 1945 - don't ask whom they were rounding up and killing for Germany in 1944). These people adore Stepan Bandera, the on again off again Nazi collaborator and ultra nationalist who ordered the genocide of 300,000 Poles in Galicia to ethnically cleanse it for a Ukrainian homeland.

The first revolution, in 2004, started the disputes because it forced use of the Ukrainian language, a vulgar and coarse language of uneducated rednecks that people still laugh at (opening a phrasebook and seeing, "At the Hospital", the polite version of "I vomited" sounds, to the Russian ear, like "I done hurled", and the 1990s Russian Internet was dying with laughter over the instructions for Tampax in Ukrainian, which sounded like "chick doctors all agree Tampax are the best tampons to shove up your cootch" ). Now this base patois was the only official language, despite the fact that even now, most people outside the West of the country speak Russian.

The Ukrainians stole natural gas from Russia, they blamed Russia for a "genocide of Ukrainians" in the 1932-33 Famine, even though it killed millions more in Southern Russia and 25% of the population of Kazakhstan (a demographic nightmare from which Kazakhstan never recovered). They blamed the Russians even though a Georgian ran the Soviet Union, and the policy was executed by 3 Ukrainians, 2 Latvians, a Pole and a Lithuanian in addition to 2 Russians (this is information I double checked from the Ukrainian government's own websites, by the way - thankfully the documents were in Russian).

In 2014, after a revolution that resembled the US January 6 riots more than a legitimate uprising, the US recognized a government that immediately banned the Russian language (they reversed course a few days and sans one Crimea later), offered to open a naval base for NATO next to the Russian base in Sevastopol, wanted to kick Russia out of those bases even though the lease had decades left, and started to let the most extreme West Ukrainian dreams be realized (like making Stepan Bandera's birthday a national holiday).

Putin had been warning NATO about red lines for Russia for seven years at this point, incredibly patiently. But this was too much, so he took Crimea immediately and tried to foment uprisings in the East (probably legitimate when they started but lacking the support to persist without Russian support, which they got). The idea was to create the territorial conflicts that would de facto exclude Ukraine from NATO. In the circumstances, it was a very measured move.

But the promises Ukraine made to stop the war were never kept, we started joint training exercises anyway, and Putin saw Ukraine start to become an armed outpost of NATO in all but name.

I will say that he may exaggerate some of the immediate threat, but the long-term threat is there, and it is real enough that I think any other Russian government would act in a similar fashion. After seeing Biden's disgraceful exit from Afghanistan (I think most people were happy to get out, just not in such a half-assed way) and the way the guy mumbles through half-sentences and looks around confused, Putin realized this was his best opportunity. It was now or never. And yes, Zelensky at one point mused aloud that perhaps Ukraine should develop a nuclear weapon.

Russia only put about 1/3 of its invasion force in so far and has tried to avoid using any tactics that would cause mass casualties. In other words, no Grozny 1994. And the Russian Army of 2022 is not the same as the Grozny 1994 army; their guided missiles are at least as accurate as US Tomahawks in the 1991 Gulf War, if not as good as our current stockpiles.

If the Ukrainians continue resistance, though, I suspect he'll order the rest of the forces in and start more indiscriminate attacks.

But the reality is that Russia tried to talk, tried to play by the US rules, and finally said "fuck you". And they don't care about the sanctions, and they'll live like an armed camp again like they did in the Soviet days if they have to, but at least the Europeans are fucking shitting their pants now because Russia stopped listening to America, because America honestly never offered Russia anything. It was, "Stop invading Georgia, and we'll talk." Putin stopped, and the US talked to Russia in vague terms for years and kept doing whatever the fuck it wanted to. Then it was "Stop killing the Ukrainian army in East Ukraine, and we'll talk." Again, lots of empty platitudes. Putin finally lost patience and said, "Are you going to give us any actual guarantees of security?" "Pull your troops back, and we'll talk" was the answer. No wonder he invaded. I would have in his place.