1. You mentioned Crimea. Let's just start there for example. Here are things you as a Ukrainian might not know because I doubt this would have been taught in public education:
Even before Ukraine seceded from USSR, Crimea already wanted to be independent of Ukraine. 95% voted to secede from Ukraine but they were ignored:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Crimean_sovereignty_ref...
That same year, Ukraine voted to leave the USSR and a mere 54% of Crimea voted in favor. This is always cited as the basis for Crimea voting to "be part of Ukraine" but 54% is much lower than 95%, and the question was whether Ukraine would be independent of USSR, not Crimea from Ukraine.
You can see Crimea continued to want to be independent because in 1992 they declared a republic with its own self-government. They vote to elect their own President, which Kyiv denounces as unconstitutional: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Crimean_constitution
But Ukraine created a Ukrainian Presidential Representative in Crimea, kicking off a wave of protests there. Their 1994 referendum strongly supported autonomy and independence from Ukraine again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Crimean_referendum
The Crimean public popularly elect pro-Russian president Yuriy Meshkov. He clashes with the parliament. Ukrainian government intervenes in the crisis, invades Crimea with about 4000 officers, scraps their constitution, removes their President, and deports him to Russia. Kyiv appoints Anatoly Franchuk to run Crimea instead, rather than a popularly-elected leader.
Crimea was demanding autonomy from 1991-1993 and Kyiv agreed to give them this autonomy. It was only on this basis that Russia agreed to support Crimea being under Ukraine. But then in 1995 they renegged on it, and invaded it.
There is much more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Crimea_(1991%E2%80%...
So shouldn't this be mentioned when people talk about Crimean referendum in 2014 being "rigged" and "under Moscow influence and little green men"? What about Kyiv's influence and 4000 officers?"
Crimea protested against NATO presence since 2006: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/world/americas/11iht-kiev...
It makes sense since Crimea was originally under Russian SSR but got transferred in 1954 to Ukrainian SSR. A decade earlier, Stalin had deported 200,000 Crimean Tatars, in a horrific ethnic cleansing. But even before that, Russians were the majority there. So it's not surprising to me why they would want to be independent from Ukraine.
Funny enough, in the 2014 referendum the only two choices were "under Ukraine" or "under Russia". I think if they had a third choice, "independence from both countries", they'd choose that.
I am on neither country's side, I'm a libertarian, I just think there is a matreshka doll of countries wanting to control regions. Georgia wanted to bring Abhazia and South Ossetia under control, and was emboldened by NATO. Thankfully that whole war was averted quickly. I mean, heck, I strongly condemned Russia's bombing of Grozny, Chechnya. I condemn Erdogan's starving of Rojava region and diverting water from it. I condemn Stalin's role in Holodomor as much as I condemn the British role in the Irish Potato Famine. I don't think it's right for anyone to exercise force over large groups of people.
Libertarians would say a simple solution is just to allow both Russians, Ukrainians, Greeks, Jews, Tatars and others to visit Crimea, live there, own property, etc. There is no reason to fight about it. Having exactly one flag over every region on earth is not a principle worthy to have everyone killing each other over.
Ironically, when everyone is just provinces under one federation / union (Canada, USA, USSR) they think more sanely. When Crimea changed hands from Russian SSR to Ukrainian SSR in 1954, no one killed each other over it. They just changed road signs and moved on. They didn't try to divert water from it, Erdogan-style, as punishment. Why in the 21st century can't we have more approaches like that? Well, it seems we can, inside federations. Europe has stopped fighting under the EU, and it was horrific before. It's some kind of nationalistic / statist madness. Here is a statistic I want to leave you with: 11 million Russians have family members in Ukraine, and vice versa. Do you think they want to kill them? Those are stories of love, of people meeting and starting families, there are so many, why do we focus on stories of hate now? Because politicians. They fail to avert wars, due to their pride and incompetence, and refusing to listen to each other in good faith. Then for years they sip wine and give speeches about how "we" must fight until victory, while the plebs kill each other due to their failures. Plebs just want to make money and feed their family. That's my view.
Some data points might be correct, but you have not enough data to connect the dots, so you make wrong conclusions.
Russia was threatening with invading Ukraine right from the beginning of its recent independence.
There were two large schools of thoughts how to deal with it:
1) try to “go around rain drops” by not provoking Russia but simultaneously to not give up sovereignty
2) move as fast as possible and seek protection from NATO like baltics and other eastern europeans.
When Russia starts regaining power internally, it became much harder to “go around raindrops”, as russia start to perform FSB style operation to discredit Ukraine in the west and to enforce its will on the inside.
Kravchuk (2nd president), falls the victim of that when Ukraine was accused of selling weapons to counties under sanctions, which made him a pariah in the west.
Later he was accused of ordering of killing a journalist which made him a pariah on the inside.
Also it was time when Russia tried to make the first attempt of annexing Crimea by trying to get first island near it - (Tusla).
Kuchma was able to make some agreement with russia a relax the tensions.
Then russia decided that the next president have to be Yanukovych - a criminal with served jail time.
An opposed politician was Yuschenko, who was famous for his reforms on the national bank and was considered by the time a successful manager and politician.
What’s worse, Russia helped to rig the elections and later poison Yuschenko with dioxin.
This caused a first revolution.
Yuschinko understood very well what he was dealing with and saw the only salvation from NATO as the threats from Russia increased.
And so on, and so forth.
US was not in favor of Ukrainian independence for a very long time and never helped in any way, except for disarming. The first time US president arrived to Ukraine was to talk the parliament out of proclaiming independence.
Europe was always afraid of russia and very careful with Ukraine.
Russia was always threatening and tried to regain control over Ukraine - both politically, by sabotage, special operations and military.
Ukraine was looking for help and screaming that russia will attack sooner or later.
Ukraine consider itself to be part of Europe by values, and is fighting russia for more than a century already paying huge price.
NATO was considered the only way to finally stop this cycle, but with US withdrawing, it may seems that all of the struggle was in vain as Europe might not be capable to protect even itself.