Text/Fat Guy Eggplant
As for why Putin marched into Ukraine in a big way, the international community can be said to have divergent opinions. But just a few days ago, a secret Ukrainian military document that was made public may have revealed the most direct cause of the war - it turned out that the Ukrainians had been planning an offensive a few months earlier.
According to the Global Network quoting the website of the Russian Ministry of Defense, on March 9, local time, the Russian military released a confidential document of the Ukrainian army captured in the war, thus officially exposing a series of conspiracies in Ukraine. In this "heavyweight" document, the Ukrainian government ordered that the 4th Combat Brigade of the National Guard, an elite unit directly under the Ukrainian government, send a battalion-sized elite unit to conduct targeted joint training, and all preparations will be completed by February 28. Once the training is completed, the unit will work in tandem with another elite of the Ukrainian army, the 80th Independent Air Assault Brigade, to launch a major attack on the East Utonbas region, where the independent forces are located.
The exposure of this classified plan directly declares that the Ukrainian authorities' previously declared that the "plan to occupy the eastern Ukrainian region without arms" is an outright lie. The action plan was drafted as early as last year and sent to the military leaders of Kiev, Odessa and Lviv in January this year. And it is worth mentioning that this so-called "battalion-level combat group" has been training in Lviv since 2016 with military advisers from the United States, the United Kingdom and other Western countries, which can be called the elite of the elite. Ukraine's planned preparations to mobilize the group also proved that the Ukrainian army did have strong ambitions to take Donbass.
However, it is worth mentioning that the senior commander of the Ukrainian army, Lieutenant General Mikola Baran, who made this plan and signed it in his own handwriting, was formally dismissed by Zelenskiy on January 27 this year due to the Dnipro shooting. Therefore, whether this plan will be implemented is actually still unknown. But it can be speculated that this plan is likely to be the biggest direct reason for Putin's determination to send troops to Ukraine: if Ukraine is allowed to act first, Russia, which must fight across borders, is bound to be passive in the international community.
(Mikola Baran)
Of course, in addition to this secret action plan that was exposed, there are two other reasons for Ukraine's beating. First of all, Zelenskiy has been committed to joining NATO, pandering to the US policy of "NATO's eastward expansion", and even repeatedly encouraging Western countries to send military forces and provide military assistance to Ukraine. Once Ukraine officially joins NATO, then the United States can even deploy missiles to Russia's doorstep in accordance with nato's mutual defense agreement, staging a "Ukrainian missile crisis." In this case, in order to ensure his national security, Putin can only act in advance and eliminate potential threats.
In addition, Zelenskiy has previously trumpeted "the possibility of re-possession of nuclear weapons", and Svetlana Zalishchuk, an adviser to the Prime Minister of Ukraine, has openly declared internationally that "if we have nuclear weapons, Russia will not attack us" and "giving up nuclear weapons is a complete mistake". With such dangerous intentions and a certain amount of nuclear weapons technology in place, Russia's repeated warnings to eliminate potential nuclear threats are not only beneficial to Russia, but actually beneficial to all countries around the world, including the United States.
We cannot simply classify the Russo-Ukrainian war as "just" or "evil," but we can see that this war is not only a concentrated outbreak of contradictions between Russia and Ukraine, but also a powerful counterattack by Russia against NATO countries led by the United States. Ukraine has fallen to this point, not because of any "imperialist aggression," but precisely because Zelenskiy connived at and supported the expansion of imperialist hegemony and allowed neo-Nazi ideologies to run rampant, and in the final analysis, he did it himself.