Yeah, so creating a nazi military batallion out of a nazi paramilitary to fight an ethnic civil war against Russians may not have been the genius military move Poroshenko thought it was :(

Yeah, so you're basically pushing Putin's narrative, which is bullshit.

The invasion would have happened anyway because it's motivated by fascist imperialism, and the propaganda is mostly made up and would have been the same as well, minus some specifics.

Putin's narrative? The Ukrainian government are entirely open about what Azov is.

Putins narrative is that the Ukrainian government is run by Nazis. Thats obviously false, but yeah, they absolutely used Nazi paramilitaries to cling on to Russian speaking territory and dont deny it.

It sort of sounds like you're saying that this means Nazis arent the bad guys we thought they were and we should stop villifying them, which is an interesting hill to choose to die on.

No, I'm saying that the use of Nazi paramilitaries is not in fact a cause of the Russian invasion. It has certainly been a welcome opener for Russian propagandists, but they're using the Nazi card so indiscriminately that they never really needed it. To the Russian propaganda, every Ukrainian who doesn't welcome the invaders enthusiastically (which nowadays includes the vast majority of Russian speaking Ukrainians) is a Nazi.