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It’s clear that Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks to take control of Ukraine and overthrow its democratically elected government.
Russia’s stated goal is that Ukraine needs to allegedly be freed from oppression and “cleansed of the Nazis,” according to Putin.
This false narrative has been blasted on Russian state-run media outlets, claiming that Ukraine has been run by fascists since 2014.
Putin seeks to bring to court “those who committed numerous bloody crimes against civilians.”
The map below shows the location of Russian attacks in Ukraine as of March 8th:
Back in 2014, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted from power after months of protests against his rule.
However, Yanukovych was pro-Russian. Since then, Putin has claimed the country has been taken over by extremists.
In 2014, Russia retaliated in 2014 by seizing the southern region of Crimea.
This triggered a rebellion in the east, backing separatists who have fought Ukrainian forces in an eight-year war that has claimed 14,000 lives.
More on the Russia-Ukraine war via BBC:
Ukraine has made clear it wants to join the European Union and the Western defensive alliance, Nato, but the Kremlin will not have it.
In late 2021, Russia began deploying big numbers of troops close to Ukraine’s borders. President Putin repeatedly denied planning an invasion, but then he scrapped the 2015 Minsk peace deal for the east and recognised areas under rebel control as independent…
One clue to his war aims came in an editorial published on 26 February then deleted by state news agency Ria-Novosti in which the writer praised a new world order where Russia was restoring its pre-1991 Soviet unity, gathering the so-called Russian world of Russians, Belarusians and Little Russians (Ukrainians).
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Last year, President Putin wrote a long piece describing Russians and Ukrainians as “one nation”, and he has described the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 as the “disintegration of historical Russia”.
A puppet has worked out in Belarus, through long-time authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko, but in Ukraine that is quite another matter.
