There's a lot that could be said about this, and I've touched on the topic in the past a couple of times. But recent aggression by Russia toward the sovereign state of Ukraine has me circling back around to it. I won't beat around any bushes today, and if you want my full thoughts on the subject, those posts linked up above still cover them pretty well. I just want to point out that in a narrative involving nations, generalizations are going to almost always be wrong.
Russia is invading Ukraine. These facts aren't in dispute. The reason Russia is invading Ukraine isn't, unfortunately, quite as clear. Russia has their state-sponsored official reason, of course, which is what they're telling the Russian people. That reason seems to be some mix of "Ukraine was going to join NATO and then invade us" and "also Ukraine is killing Jews for some reason." The first point probably wasn't true before the invasion; Ukraine hadn't really shown much interest in NATO membership in years prior, from what I've read. That said, if it wasn't true before, you can bet your iron-soled jack-boots it is now, Russia.
The second reason is a straight-up lie, the kind of patently false information a certain former president of ours was fond of, except in the case of Russia there aren't as many great ways to vette your sources given the plethora of government-controlled news outlets. Turns out Trump's admiration of Putin ran deeper than we all thought; he was genuinely trying to cosplay as the Russian oligarch, but he missed the step where you toss all the independent journalists out a sixth story window before you start lying to the public.
So since the reasons the Russian government is giving for their aggression are total bunk, what is the real reason behind all this? Honestly, based on what I've read from exterior analysts and people who have been living in and working around the Russian government for decades, it seems like Putin just wants some more power. He's consolidated as much power as he thinks he can within Russia, and now he's chasing the heady rush of exerting control over a foreign power. You see trends like that in the way he's dealt with the rest of the planet over the years; this isn't a new thing. Meddling in elections in other countries, including the US, was apparently just to tide him over until he'd solidified the interior and international clout to throw his military into the mix.
The Ukrainians, for their part, are fighting back in an incredible way. Sources from inside of Moscow suggest that Putin apparently thought he'd take Kyiv within 24 hours of his offensive. Instead, the Russian's are finally on the receiving end of one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is, of course, to never get involved in a land war in... well, Asia technically, but the last analysis I read suggested that geologists think that Europe and Asia, if they ever were separate tectonic plates, officially fused centuries ago. So the continent really is just Eurasia, and I'm going to go ahead and apply the dictates of the classic blunders to the eastern European region as well.
After all, that's where Hitler had most of his problems.
The overall narrative, given all of this, is going to paint itself pretty handily. Big Russian bullies, led by their capitalist oligarch dictator Putin, are invading Ukraine, a nation of scrappy underdogs, who's president is so good at turning-phrase under threat of death that George S. Patton would already be halfway to Kyiv, laughing, were he still alive. It's a pretty story, the kind of thing that gets made into movies.
And it's only half the truth. Because we are not mannequins, as I've said before; or to put it another way, the world is actually 3D.
This narrative of a nation of bullies attacking a nation of innocents is a classic comeback story in the making, but it ignores a couple of key facts; Russian citizens aren't nearly as cloistered from the outside world as they were back when Putin was in the KGB; despite efforts to the contrary, the internet is still a thing. They know that Putin is invading for his own benefit, not theirs, not anyone in Ukraine's, and they've taken to the streets by the thousands to protest his actions. This is in a country with a government that has set the precedent of tossing dissenters off rooftops; these protests are not the acts of a bully.
And on the other side, Ukraine has a party of nationalist neo-nazi's, just like every other western country. These people are racist, classist, generally bigoted jerks who believe everyone that doesn't agree with them is, at best, livestock. But because they have nationalist beliefs, they were among the first to take up arms as private citizens against the Russian invaders. They are fighting for the "scrappy underdog" ideals right now, but they are not admirable people.
In the end, my advice is as always to strive to be well informed. Understand that if you don't put effort into that, you're going to be seeing the world in 2D; a flat, easy to parse story, that when everything else is said and done, will be wrong. Or at the very least, incomplete. So make sure you look for the depth in what's happening. Today, just like yesterday, it's there.
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