OK you're being vague again. I made a comment about a country having the sovereign right to defend merkin invaders and how they should not be expected to just bend over and give up territory.
So I'm keen to know why you have a different view and in particular why Ukraine should. Also unsure why other countries are "at fault" here. The Ukraine seeking inclusion into Nato spooked Putin into action, as Nato have a long held policy that an attack against a Nato country is an attack against all Nato Countries.
This May BBC report pretty much predicted what Russia would do. Low and behold last week they held a "referendum" just like they did for Crimea and just took the land. Last week they declared that the Donbas is Russian land for ever...
I suspect that Odessa is next on the hit list to deny Ukraine access to the Black Sea. Ukraine supply the world with
Forty percent of the World Food Program's wheat supplies and are shipped out via Odessa.
A year into Russia's war, he has little to show for it but there is no sign of an end.
www.bbc.com
Russia's leader refused to call it an invasion or a war. Moscow continues to coin Europe's biggest war since 1945 a "special military operation".
The claims of Nazis and genocide in Ukraine are completely unfounded but part of a narrative repeated by Russia for years. "It's crazy, sometimes
not even they can explain what they are referring to," complained Ukraine's foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba.
However, an opinion piece by state-run news agency Ria Novosti made clear that "denazification is inevitably also de-Ukrainisation" - in effect erasing the modern state.
And it is Russia that is now accused by the international community of carrying out war crimes. Several countries including the US and Canada go further and call it genocide.
After so much destruction, the Russian leader's words ring very hollow now: "It is not our plan to occupy the Ukrainian territory; we do not intend to impose anything on anyone by force."
How have Putin's aims changed?
A month into the invasion, Russia pulled back from Kyiv and declared its main goal was the "liberation of Donbas" - broadly referring to Ukraine's eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk. More than a third of this area was already seized by Russian proxy forces in a war that began in 2014, now Russia wanted to conquer all of it.
The Kremlin claimed it had "generally accomplished" the aims of the invasion's first phase, which it defined as considerably reducing Ukraine's combat potential. But it became clear from Russia's withdrawal that it had scaled back its ambitions.
"Putin needs a victory," said Andrei Kortunov, head of the Russian International Affairs Council. "At least he needs something he can present to his constituency at home as a victory."
Russian officials are now focused on seizing the two big eastern regions and creating a land corridor along the south coast, east from Crimea to the Russian border. They have claimed control of the southern region of Kherson and a leading Russian general has said they have hopes of seizing territory further west along the Black Sea coast towards Odesa and beyond.
"Control over the south of Ukraine is another way out to Transnistria," said Maj Gen Rustam Minnekayev, referring to a breakaway area of Moldova, where Russia has some 1,500 troops.
If Russia does capture both eastern regions, it will most likely try to annexe them after a sham vote, as it did with Crimea in 2014. Ukraine also accuses occupying forces in Kherson of planning a referendum on creating separatist entity: they are already introducing Russia's currency, the rouble, from 1 May.
www.abc.net.au
