And the military was running pysops on that too: https://gizmodo.com/pentagon-social-media-psyop-military-rus...

And then there was this plan from 2019: "Providing lethal aid to Ukraine would exploit Russia’s greatest point of external vulnerability. But any increase in U.S. military arms and advice to Ukraine would need to be carefully calibrated to increase the costs to Russia of sustaining its existing commitment without provoking a much wider conflict in which Russia, by reason of proximity, would have significant advantages." - Overextending and Unbalancing Russia https://web.archive.org/web/20190601000000*/https://www.rand...

The amount of rabid "let's go to nuclear war, it can't be that bad" immediately after the beginning was probably one of the scariest things I've personally witnessed.

A lot of it was also people calling for things while seemingly intentionally bot following them to their logical conclusions, i.e.:

1) "We need a no fly zone over Ukraine

and somehow not connecting the dots to that meaning

2) NATO jets shooting down Russian jets

which in turn leads to

3) A hot war with between nuclear powers

something that hasn't happened outside of a few border skirmishes between India and Pakistan