It is perhaps history's most justified war. (In that it has so many contradictory justifications)

1. Ukraine is run by the first Jewish Nazi president. So obviously they needed to be denazified

2. Russia does not want a NATO country on it's borders. That is why it invaded a country with four NATO borders

3. Ukraine has WMDs!

4. Ukraine is actually just a part of Russia, and the Soviet Union just messed up and drew a random border. No reason to care what the Ukrainians think

> Russia does not want a NATO country on it's borders. That is why it invaded a country with four NATO borders

Not commenting on the other points but I think the general idea was to create a border state between Russia proper and said NATO countries, maybe out of the whole Ukraine with a Russian puppet as president, or out of several Ukrainian statelets. If it matters I do live in one of those NATO countries bordering Ukraine.

I also thought the Ukraine as a neutral independent buffer state would be best for everyone. The problem is that Russia won’t allow Ukraine to be independent. It has to be a puppet state at least. There is a deleted Russian state news article describing their ambitions. This article was meant to be published after Russian victory in two days, but things obviously didn’t go as plannend.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220226224717/https://ria.ru/20...

Russias hyper aggressive policy against Ukraine has bitten them in the ass. I believe a softer approach would have been better. Focus on strengthening economic and cultural ties. Have Ukraine to be Russia sympathetic country instead of a Russian controlled one.

That idea seems to be less relevant since there are Baltic states and Norway already bordering Russia.

Edit: If Russia really needs buffer - it is big country, they can create it inside Russia`s border. But they do not need this buffer because Russia`s army compared to NATO is nothing - buffer would not help. But Russia has more nuclear missiles then NATO. And that is more powerful then some mythical buffer zone.

the general idea was to install a Yanukovych 2.0 to disallow exfiltration of black money percentages to liberals, and not to the Russian oligarchs and connected presidency where it historically belongs to. democracy and free markets are a major disruption to their extortion business model.

plus they need Mariupol and the protected black sea harbors.

> Russia does not want a NATO country on it's borders. That is why it invaded a country with four NATO border

A country not in NATO, and with no imminent prospects of membership, unlike the five NATO countries that actually share a land border with Russia.

At best, this does absolutely nothing about the amount of NATO on Russias border.

And this isn't a war or invasion just an "special military operation".