We all know what the western narrative is, because that’s all you’re allowed to hear inside the empire media bubble. You and everyone else is being lied to by the largest, most brutal and manipulative military empire that has ever existed. You all know you were lied to about the illegal invasions, war crimes and genocides in Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan and the ongoing ethnic cleansing in occupied Palestine. There are mountains more you probably don’t know about, but I’m sure you know what you’d find if you looked.

The narrative that Putin is at war for a constant shifting collection of unevidenced reasons is just as thin as the ones you heard about Iraq, and those are pushed on you just as aggressively. I’m sure on some level you’re aware of that but afraid to nurture that doubt because the implications are horrible and it might mean you were completely wrong. It’s okay to be wrong. It’s a sign of intellectual maturity to be able to admit that and it’s hard for us adults to do. We all get to be wrong many times in our lives and it’s not your fault the empire of endless war is always lying to you about its endless wars.

The shortest version is that NATO is an extension of US military hegemony with an almost singular purpose of weakening and attacking the Soviet Union and later, post-Soviet Russia. The goal in this proxy war has been to suborn Ukraine as a NATO client state and turn it into a giant military base, nukes and all, pointed at Russia, right on their border – with the added benefit of bringing in private US corporations to loot the estimated $12 trillion in mineral wealth.

There are a long running chain of events going back to before WW2 that set this proxy war up. But the most important key to all this is the 2014 Maidan Coup, the events leading up to it and the 8 years afterward. Here’s a good explanation video from a politically active Ukrainian about what happened