Just a followup. Western countries being on the wrong side of history comes with being the "dominant" power for quite a while. That comes when you mix power and people that don't care much about morals (which is most people who own this power). Russia has also been on the wrong side of history a bunch of times. My point was, history has a meaning but is not all that matters, and you can't necessarily interpret the present through the scope of history.

Well now we're adding more assumptions. It's not just that Ukraine would be nazis, but that they are having NATO involved in the whole thing. And that's a bigger assumption considering that no one gave a flying fuck about Ukraine (or had a negative view of it, for not such bad reasons) until Zelensky did his little stunt to shame Europe into helping them. And even then, it has been a drop by drop help, because everyone is scared of Russia.

And I don't see how opening borders and basically playing "nice" could specifically lead to hostility. If Ukraine is a crazy violent country that wants to exterminate Russians, then they would attack eventually either way; evacuating people to Russia before the military conflict would just protect civilians instead of letting them be in the middle of the warzone.

As for Crimea "democratically joining Russia", that's a big pill to swallow. I understand your scope of "western propaganda bias", but once again, no one is really believing Russia to be a democracy or to even like the idea of it, so I don't really see how a foreign area would democratically decide to join a dictatorship. It makes it feel like this "democratic" process would then be of the same kind that leads Putin to win all elections forever with 99% of votes and dead political opponents, while removing the democratic safeguards preventing too many reelections.

And I'll also add that in terms of purely cold reasoning, extracting people from Ukraine before going at war also means more people to support the war, so it doesn't really make sense to rush into it. Especially considering that it was obvious that the US would lose power over time, with Trump and whatever, as well as a lot of other western countries.

That's the whole problem with the narrative of Russia playing the victim: in the end, starting the war didn't make sense both on a material and a diplomatic scope. It does make sense, however, if you consider Russia to be the one that wanted to attack (and there are a bunch of reasons, very simply speaking Ukraine was an unpopular country with a lot of land and big food production, it probably seemed like an easy and valuable target).

Don't get me wrong, I have no love for western countries. That's why from the very first time I started hearing about the conflict between Israel and Palestine being ambiguous, and people supporting Israel heavily in western countries, I just read about it and concluded that yeah, Israel was obviously wrong in that case, and they kept on proving it afterwards. I have no problem considering that western news can be full of shit, and admitting that there definitely is propaganda going on (just like everywhere, but people still believe that western democracies are actual democracies, and that they are immune to propaganda, for some reason), and making my own conclusions based on what seems to make sense. But with Russia, the idea that Russia did what they did out of morals and out of trying to help against oppression, doesn't really fit the facts. I can obviously be wrong, but with the way things have been unfolding, I don't see enough evidence to consider that this narrative is the real one. And sure, maybe some part of it is slightly true and exaggerated, it's totally possible that there was systemic discrimination against a Russian "ethnicity" in Ukraine, their country was basically a political shithole. But that's not enough to make the Russian narrative believable.