Endless repetition by whore media and careless media turn lies into truth.
Whatever media you read, you read that “Russia invaded Ukraine.” The lie is not limited to official narrative-controllers, such as the NY Times, Washington Post, Reuters, AP, Bloomberg, CNN. Wikipedia, NPR, ABC, CBS, NBC, BBC, Telegraph, Guardian. It appears in alternative media, such as the Epoch Times and Breitbart. Indeed, the lie is repeated as fact almost everywhere, in the houses of Congress, the UK Parliament, Wall Street, European media and governments.
The fact is there was no Russian invasion at all. Russian forces entered Donbas at the request of the two independent breakaway republics for help against the US-trained and equipped Ukrainian army and neo-Nazi militias that were about to invade Donetsk and Luhansk. The two independent republics requested Russia to return them to Russia in 2014 along with Crimea, but Putin refused the republics, taking only Crimea because it is the site of the Russian Black Sea fleet. Instead Putin placed his bet on the Minsk Agreement, which kept Donbas as part of Ukraine.
The enforcers of the Minsk Agreement, Germany and France, later admitted that the Minsk Agreement was used to deceive Putin while Washington created a Ukrainian army to conquer the independent republics and present Putin with political difficulties for failure to defend Russians from those whose forebears fought for Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. In other words, it was a plan to discredit Putin, for his crime of dissenting from Washington’s hegemony.
Putin’s refusal to restore Donbas to Russia in keeping with the overwhelming vote of the Donbas people subjected Donetsk and Luhansk to eight years of bombardment and many casualties while Putin stood by the Minsk Agreement. Finally in February, 2022, with Washington, NATO, and the EU refusing Russia a mutual security agreement, and the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics facing invasion, Putin was forced to act to protect the Russian populations in the east and south of Ukraine that had been attached to the Ukrainian province of the Soviet Union by Soviet leaders for political and administration reasons. Donbas and Crimea were for centuries part of Russia, not Ukraine. Putin, a leader, rebuilding Russian confidence after the Soviet collapse, could not stand aside while Russian people were massacred by an American-provided Ukrainian army.
Putin’s view of his intervention was very limited. It had nothing whatsoever to do with conquering Ukraine. His publicly announced “Special military operation” had to do only with driving Ukrainian forces out of Donbas. Putin made no effort to conquer Ukraine.