I shall here state and — by means of links to my sources — document, the actual history of the war in Ukraine, and then will present the Russian version of this history, as that was stated at the U.N. Security Council on July 16th by Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
The most important difference between these two historical accounts is that whereas mine attributes Russia’s 24 February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, to Russia’s main reason for the invasion being Russia’s need to prevent the U.S. Government from achieving its long-held dream of placing its nuclear missiles a mere 317 miles away (five minutes of missile-flying time away) from The Kremlin (since only Ukraine is even nearly that close to the Kremlin); Russia’s instead attributes its 24 February 2022 invasion of Ukraine to Russia’s main reason for the invasion (“Special Military Operation”) being Russia’s desire to protect the residents in the breakaway far-eastern former Donbass region of Ukraine (which by then had separated itself from Ukraine), to protect them from the military attacks that ever since April 2014 Ukraine’s government was making against the residents there.
Did Russia do it to protect itself, or to protect the Donbassers?