Oh, come on. You don't need to invoke existential certainty to know that unilateral military invasion of peaceful nations is "evil" inasmuch as that word has any meaning at all.
Talk to a Russian, then come back and let's talk about what's an invasion of a peaceful nation. They're going to tell you that 14K were killed due to a fascist regime. Now, I don't believe that, but you're proving my point. Maybe it's just the naive perspective of moral certainty speaking, or maybe it's the lack of international perspective -- something one unfortunately commonly finds among Americans.
We come back to the question of evil. Maybe we grew up on too many cartoons and Hollywood movies, but good and evil are symbolic fictions.
I certainly have the international perspective you accuse others of lacking, and I rather suspect it might in fact be you who lacks that perspective.
Nobody in positions of power believes for a second that Putin has anything but his own legacy in mind at this point.
Perhaps now is their time to fix that situation.
What's less certain is the information, and my point is that you should always have a sliver of doubt in your mind that you're correct.
America invaded Iraq and Afghanistan on flimsy pretexts and then continued to occupy the latter for what, 20 years?
Why wasn’t there similar international pushback against that?
1) America has Europe by the balls because we provide most of the major military security guarantees.
2) Iraq wasn’t exactly a peaceful nation (see: Kuwait)
3) Both Iraq and Afghanistan were governed by non democratic governments; a dictator in one and by religious zealots in the other
4) No one other than the local middle eastern Arabic countries were threatened by this action by the USA, and they didn’t have enough power to put pressure on the USA
In Ukraine, Russia invaded a neighbor of NATO countries, Ukraine was actually a peaceful nation and has a democratically elected government, and the countries that don’t like Russia actually have the power to try to stop it and can get by without anything from Russia.
Afghanistan was harboring al Qaeda and Iraq was threatening use of WMDs. They weren't peaceful nations.
The latter turned out to be bluster, supported by terrible intelligence and a U.S. administration that didn't have the wherewithal to counteract its own confirmation biases, and that deserves its own appropriate condemnation, but it's nowhere near the same thing.
And while rooting for the Ukrainian side, I can't even find the Russian perspective within the sphere of information and data, other than what Russians tell me, which sounds so completely different information-wise, that I wonder if we live on the same planets. In fact I got off the phone with a Russian friend a few hours ago, and I asked their perspective but replied nothing in response. It was literally 100% inverted: that the country was fighting fascism and was conned by the U.S. due to weapons treaties in the past.
So the question is NOT about morals, whose are better - it's hard to find a villain in history with an army behind them, where each individual believed in their own evil.
So the question is about information asymmetry, at the very least, a foggy issue we have to get past before we talk about morals. Again, I'm about 90% confident that the Russian side aren't behaving in good faith, but I leave that 10%.
And most importantly I recognize my bias, in the superiority of Western European values, which means that I'm also biased with regards to those nations having the military upper hand. Which implies that even if the situation were much more ambiguous I would likely root for the Ukrainian side.
I hope that does the opposite of clear up the issue!
War is rarely a matter of good and evil purely. It's a muddled world we live in.
Certainly in the field of international relations the concepts of good and evil are in the realm of media commentary and politicians. Foreign policy crafters, and the literature around them, have a completely other way of talking.