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Prigozhin is a Russian businessman and oligarch who is often referred to as “Putin’s chef” due to his close ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He was born on June 1, 1961, in Leningrad, now known as St. Petersburg, Russia.
The biggest factor was nationalism. The USSR was one large super-state made up of many smaller states that had been independent countries in the past; sort of like the United States, if Texas, California, and Idaho had all spoken separate languages for centuries and considered themselves, to varying extents, different races before being united under one federal government.
Whataboutism: What about what the west did in Syria/Afghanistan/Iraq? They are no place to judge.”
Why it’s illogical: Implies justification of Party X’s past actions for Party Y’s current actions. You can and should criticize more than one thing, but the conversation at hand is Russia invading Ukraine. Also there seems to be little accountability in the case of Russia in its extreme amount of war crimes.
There’s an element of the fact that the west is generally on Ukraine’s side, and that we’re therefore seeing a Ukraine-centric perspective
But at the same time, the maps don’t lie: Russia was expected to roll Ukraine over in a matter of days or weeks, yet is now 7 weeks into the war and have clearly not steamrolled Ukraine or even achieved their likely/apparent goals
Russia spends 3x times more of it’s Budget on the military than countries with a comparable economy, so it has far more military hardware and personnel. They also have mandatory military service.
The export a great deal of hardware from guns, vehicles, tanks, and airplanes to other nations which helps justify their R&D budget.
They also have huge amounts of surplus hardware left over from the Soviet Union. A lot of hardware the Russians are using is very old and much of the new state-of-art equipment they flaunt is in very short supply.
In September 2004 Yushchenko became seriously ill. He was flown to Vienna’s Rudolfinerhaus clinic for treatment and diagnosed with acute pancreatitis, accompanied by interstitial edematous changes, due to a serious viral infection and chemical substances that are not normally found in food products.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had also turned down an offer from the United States of evacuation from the capital city Kyiv.
“The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride,” Zelensky told the US.
“I am here. We are not putting down arms. We will be defending our country, because our weapon is truth, and our truth is that this is our land, our country, our children, and we will defend all of this,”
“That is it. That’s all I wanted to tell you. Glory to Ukraine,”
Russia launched a wide-ranging attack on Ukraine on Thursday, hitting cities and bases with airstrikes or shelling, as civilians piled into trains and cars to flee. Ukraine’s government said Russian tanks and troops rolled across the border in a “full-scale war” that could rewrite the geopolitical order and whose fallout already reverberated around the world.
In unleashing Moscow’s most aggressive action since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, President Vladimir Putin deflected global condemnation and cascading new sanctions — and chillingly referred to his country’s nuclear arsenal. He threatened any foreign country attempting to interfere with “consequences you have never seen.”
(article)
This is quite a complex situation and there’s not really a single clear answer. Broadly speaking, there are 3 explanations that have been commonly offered for the current conflict. These reasons are not mutually exclusive but opinions differ on which of them is more important.
