Bound to happen. The frozen war that the forces of history vowed would never happen happened at their behest. Say one thing, think another, do a third.
In 2014 or thereabouts Putin extended Russian passports to any Ukrainian that wanted one. It meant there was a ready supply of Russian citizens to defend, just in time to declare himself the defender of the ethnos, the defender of any Russian. This gave a big boost to the Donetsk People's Party, founded some 8 years before and which ran summer camps to train youths in the Donbas for military training for the 8 years before suddenly they had a large militia trained and true. Of course, the funding for these camps is unclear.
Then for years the enemy was the Ukrainian Jewish fascist democratic liberals who tolerated homosexuality. And who wanted to ban Russian. At least that's what the Russian press said, dominated by transmissions and press reports from Moscow. That last was part of the impetus for the split in the east and south. Of course, it was fake, but it was widely believed even in the West by those who preferred Russia over the EU and the West. So after fragmenting the citizenry, the Donetsk People's Party private militia, buttressed by Ukrainian training (in the to-be-banned Russian language, paradoxically) was clear in its goals.
The best the West could do when faced with bullets is the equivalent of Rimmer's "Mutants out" and "Chameleonic life forms, no thanks!" The sanctions that the West claimed crippled Russia were mostly lower oil prices unrelated to any policy that leaders in the West were willing to stand behind--economic downturn and long-term energy efficiencies driven by high energy prices, coupled with strongly increased fracking and the resultant higher production of carbon-based oil and natural gas. What leader would get up in the West and say, "I'm proud that some areas of the country have $4/gallon gasoline, and aim to make sure that this blessing extends to all on the way to $8/gallon gas!" Or, "Because of my policies, we've increased carbon-based fuel production to levels not seen in the US for 30 years." Right. Instead, we gloat, "We've crippled Russia by making sure that these 10 individuals have a harder time moving their ill-gotten games into Western banks."
Now Putin's coopting those that didn't ask for Russian passports at the time.
As for the Russian peace initiative, that's mostly based on Russian sources. So we trust RT and the like when it meets our narrative needs and denounce them as purveyors of the finest in fakery when it doesn't. Got it. I don't trust RT and its sister sources, and many of the "facts" often cited just immediately vanish. Others are often innuendo, hearsay, or instances of "I suspect" or "It's possible" becoming "it's established as fact" when built on a foundation of shared suspicion. Otherwise, we're mostly left with people doing business as business people do, something that the pure representatives of all Americans who work entirely in the pure public sector and in academia never would do. Then again, those in the public sector never would need to. (Heck, I have Russian ties. I've been to Leningrad, volunteered as interpreter for the Sister Cities organization and worked as paid interpreter for somebody I was sure was connected to the Russian mafia. I've translated for a pro-Soviet Hungarian historian and now am translating to make sure that some kinds of Russian thinking get translated and publicized in the West. Would be working for the NSA, but I failed their clearance check: I wasn't knee-jerk in my willingness to commit to providing a quick translation with suitable urgency for information that I was sure would lead to a nuclear first strike by the US against Russia, and that was enough.)
I've seen the likes of some of the hired hands. They're not committed ideologues. You hire the advertising manager away from your competition and he doesn't continue to work for the competition. They're loyal to their paycheck and know that their reputation depends not on loyalty to a person or group but on doing the best job they can for their current employer (this is unthinkable to a lot of public servants, who are loyal to their Cause first and their employer second and willing to be dishonest about it ... I'd fire them for cause, politics notwithstanding, because all it would take for them to turn on me would be a disagreement. Loyalty to self shouldn't make one violate one's commitment; you can be both loyal to yourself and honor your word by simply quitting, it's not like they have no choice ... they just have no convenient, self-serving choice).
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