Actually I think they should have decoupled from Europe a lot sooner, so they didn’t spend 10 years dicking around watching Azov types kidnap and torture people, curious if you’d like to explicitly deny them doing that before I link to it.

Exact same situation as Iran where their big-brained liberals spent years begging for scraps and as soon as they unleashed their military they got what they were looking for the whole time, in a national interest sense. The libs were interested in just sitting around selling natural resources and thought they’d be allowed to industrialize peacefully but slowly. That’s why Russians held back from hitting rail lines for YEARS. They have recoiled from taking out power generators rather than substations, which would deny Ukrainians water after a short time.

It’s not about picking favorite countries based off headlines. History is fun you should get into it. We’re watching various forms of pushback as the US loses its leverage, which has been waning since WWII and only rebounded into a more unstable form with the Latin Americanization of the former USSR.