The West, USA and Ukraine are also responsible for Russia's behaviour

Sounds like a good time to start supporting Ukraine.

 

If making nice with Putin is okay to get along, then the Democrat strategy of going after Trump for “Russian collusion” was very misguided. The Democrats jumped on Trump for saying nice things about Putin. They are either ignorant of how business people work or ignored the fact that businessmen often say nice things to butter people up to get what they want. That’s what Trump does.

He might tell an ugly 300 pound guy that he’s handsome. It part of the game. The North Korean dictator is “little rocket man” when he was launching missiles, but “a great world leader” when Trump met him face to face.

Trump is not all bad, and some of his tactics worked.

 

I agree. Trump seems to understand some of these dictators/thugs alarmingly well.

Unfortunately we can only speculate if Putin would have invaded Ukraine under a Trump administration.

 

If you want to mail Zelensky a check, I'm sure he'll take it.

 

Not at all.

Putin is a revanchist warmonger who fancies himself as the next Peter the Great. He alone is responsible for Russia's behavior.

As for Ukraine, one could see this coming in the late 2000s (before Russia's invasion of Georgia). Clearly, Putin wanted control of the strategic (and historic) naval base at Sevastopol for Russia's Black Sea Fleet, along with the Crimean Peninsula around it. Having accomplished that in 2014, he set his eyes on his next objective - seizing a land bridge between Russia and the Crimean Peninsula in Eastern Ukraine, which he undertook in 2022. Eventually, Putin will annex this land for Russia, and it's highly likely that his territorial ambitions have finally been satisfied, especially after his military's spectacularly poor performance during the early stages of his Anschluss campaign in Ukraine. The Russian military is a second to third rate force at best - it cannot successfully fight a first rate military force such as the ones in the United States and/or NATO.

Again, all of this was set in motion long before the Maidan uprising that he used as BS pretext for moving against Ukraine and seizing its land in violation of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Ukraine is not to blame for that, the West is not to blame for that, NATO is not to blame for that. Putin is to blame for that and it sickens me when people try to shift the blame for whatever excuse(s) they choose to make. All they're doing is parroting the Kremlin's propaganda.

 

Bullshit. Did Putin invade Ukraine while Trump was president?

No he did not. He invaded Ukraine while Obama and Biden were president.

There's no speculation to be made there whatsoever, and it's ludicrous to contend otherwise.

 

What's ludicrous is that the Rs are the party, under the leadership of Mike Johnson and his cuck daddy, that are now preventing funds to thwart Putin's objectives.