I am genuinely confused by hexbear too
Is it a site for queer people or for beanis lovers?
Sorry but Putin was happy to let Donetsk and Lugansk fend for themsleves if they got the guarantees they wanted in February 2022. There’s no ethnonationalist interest from the side of Russia here.
I personally don’t believe that to be true, but that’s neither here nor there so I’ll respond to the actual substance of your comment. While you may be nominally correct, the reality is that these are majority Russian areas that would have wanted to unify with Russia should they have achieved independence from Ukraine with or without Russia’s help.
Even ignoring all of that, there was no possible future where Ukraine allows the DPR/LPR to exist independently BECAUSE Ukraine had already become a place of attempted US imperial expansion, which was my point. The imperialist expansion of the US via influence in Ukraine forced an ethnonationalist conflict on the people of the DPR/LPR, which Russia then gets to co-opt as a means of anti-imperialist resistance to the US. It is for that reason that I say imperialist expansion can cause ethnonationalist war, and that Russia is engaging in an ethnonationalist war. That does not mean Russia’s war is not anti-imperialist in nature at the same time.
