Thank you for this article. I lived in Russia during the Crimean take over and it was not a fun place to be. 7 years in that country, I speak Russian, and work still for a Russian company. It is frustrating that a)Many intelligent Russians get it and are horrified by the war and understand it better than some western apologists b) and equally horrifying is that plenty of Russians are in favor of war, and they are also quite intelligent, and many were anti-Putin prior but have swung around to "It had to be done to protect the motherland". Among my Russian friends, I have seen crazy conspiracies that Ukraine had biolabs and even that it was days away, with NATO help, of launching a nuclear attack on Russia and Saint Putin found out about it and struck first. man oh man. These western apologists have all enrolled in the Neville Chamberlain school of appeasement.