Ukraine did attack their ethnic Russian citizens in the Donbas.

Zelensky did say Ukraine should talk about getting nuclear weapons just prior to Rusia's invasion.

Ukraine did interfere with Russia's sphere of influence by allowing the US-backed coup in 2014, which prompted Russia's annexation of Crimea. The annexation was not correct. But neither was an armed coup that drove out the democratically elected president of Ukraine and put in a puppet regime hand-picked by the US (listen to Victoria Nuland's famous "fuck the EU" leaked phone call at the time).

You know nothing about me, Jon Snow. I live in Austria, but I'm not Austrian. I do care about Ukraine. I had friends their who have the luck to be wealthy enough to have fled the country. Good enough friends that we attended their wedding outside Kyiv about 10 years ago. Such good friends that my wife was a bridesmaid at the wedding.

I sympathize greatly with Ukraine, and for you personally. You have the great unfortune to be in a country neighboring a great power. A country that has twice been used in the last 100 years to invade that great power. That is not fair to you. You didn't ask for that. But that is reality.

Ukraine did a great job since the end of the USSR in balancing between Russia and the West. Profitable for Ukraine to stay neutral.

It is not your fault that the West wouldn't let that status quo remain, and helped to overthrow your election in 2004, and then your government in 2014, and since then ramp up hostilities agasint ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

I understand and sympathize that you are a Ukrainian that doesn't want to be Russian. That was the balancing act that was destroyed by meddling from the US. That is not your fault.

It is also not the fault of Russia. Russia didn't kill 10,000 ethnic Russians in the Donbas. That was Ukraine. It was Ukraine who trapped 50 Russian sympathizers in a building in Odesa and then burned them alive for protesting the 2014 coup government. Ukraine outlawed the Russian language and Russian culture - before the war.

Nazis have been a problem in Ukraine since before the second world war. Does that make everyone in Ukraine a Nazi? Of course not. Austria has a bit of a Nazi problem as well, but it is an order of magnitude smaller than the Ukraine problem. Nazi groups integrated into the military and the government openly called for killing all Russians, and were slowly implementing their plan. That was not Russia. That was Ukraine.

I don't hold you personally responsible as far as I know. As far as I know you didn't take part in any of the Ukrainian pre-invasion crimes, atrocities and ethnic cleansing. But Ukraine did.

Did all that justify Russia's invasion and the horrors that have resulted? That is for inernational judges and history to decide.

Again I say there are no good guys in this war except Ukrainian civlians - and it looks like you are one of them.

Chechnya and Georgia are quite different than Ukraine, although the situation in Georgia has some similiarities. Too detailed of subjects to start here.

I truly wish the end of this war as soon as possilble, and safety for you and the people you care about.