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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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