Is there a chance that by kind of pumping up the story of “Russia will invade Ukraine” western media and US policy inadvertently helped grow a crisis a bit more than it was…leading to Putin recognizing the two separatist areas…and then creating this new paradigm while AT THE SAME TIME the US and others then all evacuate their embassies and lead to flights being cancelled for no reason…which then kind of hands Russia a “win” in Ukraine because it has gotten all these western forces and personnel to leave and harmed Ukraine’s economy.

This is not a “blame America first” comment….I’m not saying the US created all this…I’m saying that it’s true Russia moved 150,000 troops to the borders of Ukraine…but the “invasion” talk which came before any demands by Russia then occurred in a context of Russia then saying “ok we won’t do a full invasion, we’ll take over these two regions”…thus provoking a chance of a firefight in Donbass and giving Russia a “right” to invade…

Prior to this whole crisis Russia was destabilizing the Donbass but didn’t have an excuse to do much…there was the badly worked Minsk agreement…

Then the US leaves Afghanistan and the US wants to be “back” and be tough on Russia and go to “near-peer” rivalry…that is Biden’s agenda…but the US hasn’t thought through what this means because the US won’t go to war in Ukraine or expand NATO to Ukraine yet…so without plans to actually back Ukraine…Ukraine is put in an unenviable situation of having “support” from the West without any real support…and it is LEFT DANGLING out there as Russian troops move into the DPR and LPR regions…just as Russia did in Crimea…and all Ukraine can do is watch because if it does something Russia could take more…and the western countries that talked up a crisis are all running away, removing embassies and personell…handing Ukraine to Putin…while “talking tough” about Nord Stream 2…but Nord Stream 2 and sanctions are something that doesn’t save Ukraine…so Ukraine the whole time has been careful not to provoke Russia…but in the end I suspect Ukraine will be alone, just like in past appeasement situations…so all this build-up of crisis wasn’t part of a western plan to actually stand with Ukraine…even before the first shot it seems the westerners are all running away…

So how did that help Ukraine?

How much did talk everyday by major media of “Russia invasion” actually help push the timetable up of recognition of the two fake “Republics” in eastern Ukraine…emboldening Putin to “act now” rather than later…while western countries run in circles talking tough while withdrawing diplomats.

Why withdraw diplomats. If you stand with Ukraine you shouldn’t hand it to Russia with cancelled flights and moving diplomats to Lviv as if Lviv is the capital, not Kiev. The US embassy arrogantly tweeted a “funny meme” that “trolls Putin” by showing Kiev in the 12th century while Moscow was a forest…but wars aren’t won by “trolling”…the US is moving its diplomats out of Kiev…the same city it praises for being ancient is being abandoned.

See the problem. They “troll Moscow” and have analysis about how “Sharpen your pencil Putin, here’s a history lesson”…but meanwhile everyone is being withdrawn from Kiev….so which is the history lesson?

Meanwhile in the US, as always, the story is about domestic policy and endless articles about how “Trump praises Putin”…because US politics is always domestic politics…now the US will be told its economy is “hurting because of Putin” and this will all be about the midterms…because no one ever cared about Ukrainians…they were sent out to the front and left in the cold…