They tried to take it, they failed, and then they retreated and are now pretending that it was what they wanted to do in the first place. That's ridiculous.
With 2000-3000 infantry? Seriously? The very fact that they didn't prepare for siege level logistics is proof enough that they thought they will either take Kiev via a Ukrainian surrender or they will stay there in order to disperse Ukrainian fighting capability for a week or so.
Russia attacked the Donbas first by setting up terrorist militia to try to overthrow Ukrainian control.
Should always go back to before it led to that, like the Euromaidan protests that signalled the end of psuedo-democracy in Ukraine. When histroy books are written, we are going to have to read the causes that led to the war, like relentless NATO expansion, the West's deliberate disdain over repeated Russian warnings, the failure to apply realpolitik etc, all the way until the protests happened and a democratically-elected leader was ousted and the region he represented that put him in power was disenfranchised, and his people were isolated. Russia "reacted", it's simple as that.
They weren't disenfranchised.
When democracy dies, that results in the disenfranchisement of the ones out of power. You don't need a piece of paper to tell you that.
Once pro-Russian candidates were gone, the only options were leftist Ukrainians, like Zelensky, to stand up to openly hostile Poroshenko. Zelensky pretended to be a saviour for the Russians but turned out to be the big bad wolf.
Ukraine stopped being a democracy in 2014. Even in Pakistan, while PMs are ceremoniously ousted, no parties are banned. Rather successors take over the mantle. But Ukraine's Russian opposition died in 2014.
That's a bunch of bullshit. There was a bill proposed, that didn't even actually pass, that made Ukrainian the sole official language. Everybody is bilingual anyway because these two languages are so close that when you speak one, you can grasp the other pretty quickly.
The bill passed in 2019, before Zelensky came to power.
Ukraine's parliament approved a law on Thursday that grants special status to the Ukrainian language and makes it mandatory for public sector workers, a move Russia described as divisive and said discriminated against Russian-speakers.
www.reuters.com
There's a reason why India has no national language.
Anyway if that's disenfranchisement, what should we say about the situation in Kashmir? With the total blackout imposed on the population and so on? Pretty clear that it's enough for the international community to protect the Kashmiri legally by assisting a Pakistani invasion, right?
The situation in Kashmir is being dealt with using the police because they are largely dealing with criminal elements. We are not using artillery on the Kashmiris, only tear gas. One of the goals of the blackout was to prevent the mobs themselves being attacked by terrorists in false flag operations, and not merely protect them from fake news from Pakistan, who were passing off violence in Syria and Iraq as the ongoing situation in Kashmir. Shutting down some services and suspending some liberties in order to actually protect the local population is democratically legal and is very different from doing the same for the sole purpose of waging war on the population. Kashmir's internal situation is basically a law and order problem, terrorism is cross-border. The Ukrainian attack on Donbas is state-sponsored violence against a specific group of people, typically called "genocide".
Putin explicitly demanded a return to 1997 borders, before NATO expansion. Why would he want to have the Baltic states, Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania out of NATO if he's only interested in Russian-speaking people?
Those are two different things. The Russians want NATO expansion rolled back to 1997, but they wish to have direct control over all "European Russians". They do not want the non-Russian regions under the SU all over again. Those are two different demands, or wishes if we are actually real about it.
Hell, if the world was "fair" and the West was actually "good", NATO would have dissolved right after the Warsaw Pact did.