Unfortunately there is evidence that Putin was deliberately stirring up trouble.

Even more unfortunately, at that level propaganda is beyond my ken to reliability disabuse, and I know full well that hawks want me to fear more than I need to.

Yet it is the locals he's claiming to want to liberate who are shooting his troops, the cities he's saying he wants to save that are being flattened by his missiles.

Reminds me of the stories of Afghanistan, where we blew up weddings and then were surprised the locals didn't like us.