Anyone else here see he utter lunacy of the war, or it just me?
I don’t know. Russia wants to conquer Ukraine. Ukraine wants to be free. I think it’s lunacy for Russia to think that Ukraine would just give up without a fight!
Put it in historical context. The Russian Empire occupied Ukraine except for the western part, which was "Galicia" under the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire. Germany took the eastern part of Poland, but Russia's occupation extended over much of Wielkopolska (Greater Poland) including Belarus. In WWI, the tsarist advance eastward intended to extend into Germany, and that was what the Soviet Empire ended up keeping as a satellite state, including all of Polish territory. The West barely managed to dislodge Russian occupiers from Austria, which remains outside of NATO to this day. It remains "permanently neutral".
During the WWI era, the tsarist expansion treated Ukrainians (aka
Malorussians or "Little Russians") as essentially part of Russia. Ukraine was fully incorporated into the Soviet Union, a repurposed "Russian Empire". At the end of WWI, Germany had effectively won the Eastern front and lost the Western Front. After WWII, Soviet Russia had basically won back the former territory of the Russian Empire and expanded it further to the West. However, the Eastern Bloc consisted of nation-states that, by international agreement, were treated as sovereign. Nevertheless, as rebellions post-WWII showed, they were the prevailing occupying power until Gorbachev came along and the Soviet Empire collapsed.
The new Putin regime is an irredentist movement that is still pushing the old Russian imperial view that Ukraine is essentially "Little Russia". Putin promotes the idea that Russians, Belarussians, and Ukrainians are all "one people"--part of the same spiritual nation. These are Orthodox Christian territories that largely speak languages classified as Eastern Slavic. It is the same propagandist crap that the tsarist regime spread to motivate its westward expansion into non-Russian territories. Historically, the Muscovite state regarded itself as the "Third Rome" after the fall of Constantinople in the 15th century. The name "tsar" comes from the early Rus' name for Constantinople--"Tsargrad" (literally "Caesar City"). The idea was that the Tsar was the protector and ruler of the old Rus' territories, which included essentially the eastern portion of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
When barbos calls the western part of Ukraine "Galicia", he is referring to the partitioned part of Ruthenian lands that had been under Habsburg and German occupation. Putin is very much trying to bring back the Soviet/Russian Empire, which was historically oriented towards expansion into German-speaking territories. Barbos is essentially a propagandist for that expansion into at least Eastern Ukraine. Belarus has been all but incorporated now. When Lukashenko leaves, another Russian-controlled quisling will likely be installed in his place. Belarus could even be incorporated into the Russian Federation, just as parts of Ukrainian territory have already been incorporated.
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