It was not unprovoked.
The US has been provoking Russia since the revolution in 1917. We actually invaded Russia to try to restore the Tsar.
After 1991, we looted their country and openly rigged their election in 1996 (it was on the friggin cover of Time magazine).
Over the decades, multiple documents have emerged that prove the US promised not to expand NATO to the east. We now have missile and NATO troops 100 km from Russia's border.
We provoked Georgia to attack Russia in 2008 (see the official UN report).
We backed a coup in 2014 to overthrow the democratically elected and mostly neutral Yanukovych government. We picked and unconstitutionally installed a pro-western gov't that has oppressed and killed anyone pro-Russian since 2014. 14,000 people have been killed in the Donbass (mostly in the first two years) in a civil war that William Burns (former US ambassador to Russia) explicitly stated would result if we followed the path of trying to bring Ukraine into NATO.
In Feb 2022, Ukraine increased 3x the shelling of their fellow Ukrainians in the Donbas and had massed around 60,000 troops to overrun the Donbas and wipe out the separatists once and for all.
Russia invoked Article 51 of the UN charter to invade Ukraine to avoid a larger loss of life due to Ukraine's immenent attack.
So it was anything BUT unprovoked. Note I am not an international lawyer so I do not know if Russia's claim of Article 51 would hold up and in what court. That does not change the fact that Russia has been provoked for 100+ years, and massively in the last 8.
Does that make what Russia did "right?" That is a question that is virtually impossible to answer, because we cannot know what would have happened to the Donbas if Russia had not intervened.
This war didn't start in Feb 2022. It started in 2014 with a military coup backed by the US.
If Ukraine didn't want this war, they could have implemented Minsk II, as Russia was pushing them to do since 2015. The Donbas would have remained part of Ukraine.
Poroshenko (Ukraine president) and Merkel (German chancellor) have both admitted they never intended to implement the Minsk peace plan. They only signed to give Ukraine a chance to build its military to prepare for this war.
The West - and Ukraine - provoked this war. MASSIVELY.
