haha of course I don’t watch Maddow, but ur take couldn’t be more MSNBC, John. And please with the ‘putin lie’ riff-raff, it’s lazy.

It was never about a full-blown invasion from NATO, and you know that. But as CIA director William Burns said the access to the black sea, the naval base on Crimea, 5 million russian speakers in the donbas, and having nukes 4 minutes from Moscow are all existential threats that would provoke a Russian response. That’s not an endorsement or justification that is the CIA director over a decade ago laying out how pursuing NATO expansion could lead to a hot war. Those are indisputable facts. Dozens and dozens and dozens of intelligent credible voices said this was going to be bad, and we pursued policies to exacerbate every issue rather than avoid it and guarantee peace for the people of Ukraine through the Minsk Agreement that all parties signed and the freaking UN security council accepted. Again, not a justification, war crimes are being committed, people need to be held accountable, but we need to really understand what the hell is going on in order to achieve peace.