The Russo-Ukraine War: One Year Later
Now that we're at the eve of the anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I want to take a few moments to reflect. So, this is an introspective post focused primarily on my impressions of the weeks leading up to the invasion, and after the invasion began.One thing I want to be crystal clear about is that Russia had already been at war with Ukraine for eight years by that point, having invaded Crimea in late February 2014 (following the Maidan Revolution that caused Putin's preferred despot, Yanukovich, to flee Ukraine) and would annex Crimea shortly thereafter, as well as invade portions of the Donbas region. Late in the fall of 2021, Putin had published some rambling opinion piece that acted as a form of revisionist history in which he appeared to call for the reformation of the old Russian Empire. In a sense, I wasn't surprised, since Putin has consistently lamented the fall of the USSR, which was what the empire morphed into after the October Revoluti...