Shelling. Troop massing.
Difficult to find links due to supression on US tech dominated media, but here is one link from Telesur.
In there is a link to a twitter thread from 18 Feb (pre-invasion). https://twitter.com/gbazov/status/1494694565793652742
I thought there was something from Grayzone and/or Aaron Maté, but I'll have to look further or learn how to write better search strings (frustratingly, results are almost all for after the war started).
There were also reports that Ukraine had amassed a lot of troops on the border of the Donbas. What I understood is that in the two weeks pre-invasion:
- Ukrainian troops massed
- Ukraine increased shelling (note the UN has said that 80+% of the casualties in the Donbas from 2018-2021 (they don't have numbers for 2014-2017) are on the Donbas side - meaning Ukrainian gov't doing the vast majority of shelling)
- Zelensky and US reiterating joining NATO
- Zelensky going to the Munich security conference and saying Ukraine should get nuclear weapons
- Putin taking hits domestically for letting Donbas ethnic Russian get bombed by Ukraine
That combo is what prompted the invasion. Up until a couple days ago, I thought that such an invasion is defined as a war crime (war of agression), but I've since learne there are exceptions. Article 51 (IIRC) of the relevant UN agreement, maybe?
Anyway, I'm not a military lawyer, so from my armchair I say Russia was massively provoked by the US and Ukraine, but still attacked first, making Russia "more" guilty than Ukraine, US. But as noted above, I've learned a few things in the last days that say that it is not so cut and dried, so I put an asterisk by my judgement for now.
