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Why didn't the invasion happen during Trump's presidency then? 4 years should certainly be enough, right?
Other hypothesis is that Russian financial system was not sanctioned proofed back then. Pro-war Russians would not like getting their Visa/Mastercard blocked; Russia built Mir cards since then.
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In 2016-2020, Russia hadn't even prepared for annexing the Donbas, let alone invading Ukraine. Russia also had hopes of reversing Euromaidan. After all, Poroshenko was unpopular, Zelenskyy was an unknown quantity, and Ukraine had performed a similar reversal from West to East after the Orange Revolution in 2005. Invading Ukraine would guarantee that such a reversal would not take place.
By 2022, Russia and its Donbas puppets were militarily, politically, and administratively prepared, while Zelenskyy turned out to be just as much of a problem for them as Poroshenko.
Trump's reaction to Russia's invasion of Ukraine would have been to cry a few tears for the Ukrainians, praise Putin's savvy and genius, and provide less support for Ukraine than Biden has done, and hope to appease Putin by encouraging Ukraine to cede the territory that Russia wants. We can predict all that, because that's what Trump's position has been on the Russia-Ukraine war.
I am no fan of Biden, but it's irrefutable that Trump is far softer towards Russia than Biden. This is one reason why many people like Trump! Trump's policy towards Russia has always been appease, withdraw, and sincerely pray to the Almighty for the victims of the consequences.
The problem with this take is that by the summer of 2015 Russia had already annexed the Donbass and Crimea in all but name, or have you forgotten all the talk about "friendly green men" from 2014?
The Russians problem seems to be that they drank their own Kool-Aid. They seem to have seriously underestimated the degree of support that Euromaidan enjoyed on the ground in western Ukraine and seemed to genuinely believe that if they landed some paratroopers in Kiev and seized the Rada they'd be welcomed by the populace as liberators rather than with a hail of gunfire and molotov cocktails. That shock of expectation vs reality seems to have set the tone of the war going forward. Ukraine may eventually lose this war but Ukraine losing doesn't necessarily mean a win for Russia.
Russia didn't begin mass issuing of passports in the Donbas until 2019. This was exactly to avoid Ukraine viewing it as an annexation, to leave open the possibility of reintegration into Ukraine with a Yanukovich-style president. After all, from a Russian perspective, it's preferable that Ukraine has as many pro-Russian voters as possible. The problem for Putin was that reintegration and voluntary realignment into the pro-Russia camp was no longer a plausible outcome by 2022.
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Sending some men and weapons doesn't equal to annexation. Many LDNR residents were unhappy that they weren't annexed like some American says for rhetorical reasons. They weren't getting to get Russian pensions or use Russian banks, etc.
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Huh? And what further preparations would have been deemed sufficient? Because we're aware of the extent of preparations made before the 2022 intervention, and they turned out to be, well, more or less laughable, at least in the Northern areas of operations for sure. I mean surely the Russian state had at least the same amount of resources and troops available in 2018 or 2019 as well.
Fair enough. That said, this is the same Russian regime that, according to the mainstream interpretation, successfully manipulated the results of the Brexit referendum and US elections of 2016, and colluded with Trump. Surely it was within its means to manipulate Poroshenko or get him replaced by someone more pliable, to let Russian puppets gain positions all over the Ukrainian state apparatus, and to collude with Trump to rob Ukraine of US assistance! And yet Trump did the opposite, by allowing the supply of lethal military aid to Ukraine in 2018, which no other US administration had done before. Something doesn't add up.
I suggest that his position might have something to do with no longer being in power.
They were inadequate given how much resistance the Ukrainians offered, but that wasn't anticipated in Russia.
"Manipulated" is ambiguous. (I'm criticising the mainstream interpretation, not you.) It's plausible that Russia has attempted to clandestinely influence all sorts of events in the West. Whether they were successful or decisive is a separate question.
I don't favour the mainstream interpretation and there are even some things about Trump's foreign policy that I like, such as wanting other NATO partners to perform more of a role in the alliance. It's also tough, because Trump is probably better on Middle East policy than Biden from my perspective - that's an area where the US should tread quietly, but still be supportive of Israel, just as Trump favoured. At a domestic level, I'm also closer to him than to Biden, but I'm not American, so US domestic policy affects me less than its foreign policy.
I also don't think that Trump has colluded with Russia regarding Ukraine, at least not directly. As you say, his actions are inconsistent with that. It's just not a priority for him.
I don't see any reason to think that Trump is being insincere about his policy views on the Russia-Ukraine war. In fact, I think that Trump is rarely untruthful, as opposed to misleading. He might give an impression like e.g. the Wall is a bigger priority for him than it actually was, but he really did want it, and he really did try hard to get it; it was just that he wasn't willing to fight for it as hard as some people expected him to fight, which is different from him promising to fight that hard. His relationship to the truth is more that of a salesman than an outright liar like Donna Brazile or Bill Clinton.
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