This was supposed to be an imperialist land grab by Russia. This war did not emerge organically. Russia had a goal, to seize Ukraine - easily and quickly. Russia have failed at that goal. Failing is not winning. Not only have they failed to secure their objective, the attempt to do so has cost several orders of magnitude more than intended. The land they do control is of low value.
Again, spectacularly failing to carry out your goals is not "winning", in any sense of the word.
And then this just kept iterating until suddenly everybody's fighting everybody, tens of millions are dying, and absolutely nothing was achieved. Then you get the Treaty of Versailles which desperately tried to justify it all by being excruciatingly punitive on Germany, but of course that ultimately did nothing but essentially guarantee WW2 where tens of millions more would die again, and again for basically nothing, with a good chunk of Europe left in rubble.
In the modern war Russia claimed that their motivation for the war was to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO. Their early movements were largely performative or Hail Marys (like the decapitation strike) and within 48 hours they were engaged in negotiations with Ukraine that involved 0 land concessions, but primarily focused on Ukraine not joining NATO. Ukraine chose to fight, at the urging of the West, and so here we are.
> within 48 hours they were engaged in negotiations with Ukraine that involved 0 land concessions
So you think the plan was to invade Ukraine to scare them into a hand shake that they wouldn’t join NATO? I really don’t want to insult you but…
There's a nice timeline here [1] of relations between Ukraine and NATO. It's an archived version from the day before the invasion began, so there's no hindsight posts. Things were accelerating rapidly on the Ukraine-NATO front. In January 2022 there was apparently even a bill that was to be introduced in the US declaring Ukraine a "NATO+ country" immediately. And NATO's responses towards Russia's expressed concerns began to be completely dismissive with not even a vague allusion to reconciliation.
So I think the main goal was certainly to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, but I think a major secondary goal was for Russia to make it clear that their claims of red lines and such are not toothless. If a country makes repeated claims of things being a red-line but never acts on such claims, then their future claims will be casually dismissed.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ukraine%E2%80%93N...
> Things were accelerating rapidly on the Ukraine-NATO front.
We saw with Finland and Sweden how quickly entry into the organization can progress if there's a will in the alliance to accept new members. We have not seen such will regarding Ukraine.
The whole "blame NATO" narrative is just a waste of everyone's time and completely ignores the internal developments in Russia and the ambitions of Putin and his clan. The main goal of the ex-Soviet security apparatus is to restore their lost empire and the special privileged position of the security services within it. To Europeans, the Cold War and the Iron Curtain were abnormalities that have been rectified; to the current generation of Russian decision-makers, the Cold War was a normalcy that they strive to return to. Russian dissidents have been warning for decades that the destruction of Russian democracy would sooner or later lead to resurgence of Soviet imperial thinking, and that's exactly what we're seeing.
NATO itself bears little importance in this. Russia is against all forms of European cooperation and would prefer to see countries alone and isolated, because it would permit attacking them one by one, instead of facing a joint front that they can't beat.
Heck, were Belarus to overthrow Lukashenko, they have a better chance of joining NATO than Ukraine now.
If Russia is so terrified of NATO invasion, why do they keep taking defenses off the boarder with Finland which just became a NATO member as a part of this war? Why does Russian state TV insist they should nuke Britain?
Why didn't Russia invade any of the NATO members already on their border?
>Ukraine chose to fight, at the urging of the West
It is well known that the US admin had prepared to airlift Zelensky out of Ukraine and support a literal insurgency because they expected Russia to win easily, and were not actually prepared to support Ukraine in a regular war. This resulted in Zelensky's famous "I need ammo, not a ride" statement.
Why did Russia violate their treaty terms with Ukraine, which explicitly guaranteed their security? Why should you ever trust negotiations with a leader who has clearly demonstrated they do not respect what they sign?
>Their early movements were largely performative or Hail Marys
No it wasn't. Attempting to take Hostomel was standard doctrine, and they fully expected to succeed, which is why their convoy was not in fighting shape, and carried parade uniforms.
Russia, at the very top, fully believed and intended to defeat Ukraine in 3 days. They were literally not prepared for a drawn out war.
The only other NATO members that bordered Russia before the Ukraine War were were the Baltics. They have poor geography for an invasion and would also be immediately cut off from mainland Europe in the case of a war by the Suwalki Corridor - a tiny stretch of about 40 miles that is the Baltics only connection to Europe outside of Russia/Belarus. By contrast Ukraine has ideal geography for an invasion. Kursk is also the path the Nazis ended up taking when trying to press into Russia during WW2, and also where they suffered a very costly defeat.
I do fully agree that Russia expected their negotiations with Ukraine to be successful, and had the West not intervened they likely would have been right.
[1] - https://www.newsweek.com/even-russian-propaganda-was-hesitan...
WW1 changed all that with the tank, the machine guns, the toxic gas, the trench, the air warfare.