Don't know much about history ...

Sometime in the 1990s, there was a story:

A man said, 'I was born in Austria. I went to school in Poland. I got my first job in the Soviet Union. And I retired in the Ukraine.'

'Wow,' said the boy listening to him. 'You must have done a lot of travelling.'

'I've never been outside the village where I was born,' said the man.

The Nazis said that all of Europe was populated by three ethnic groups: the Aryans, the Slavs, and the Jews. Not much that the Nazis said was right, but one can impose a completely wrong belief on that part of the world that one controls, and so the Nazis did.

The Nazis said they wanted a 'Judenfrei Europe', they wanted to make life in Europe so difficult for Jews that all would emigrate to some other continent. Then they said they wanted to deport all the Jews. But no one would take the Jews. Many tried to emigrate and were sent back to Europe by the countries where they applied for immigration. And the UK said the Royal Navy would block any deportations. So the Nazis ended up with their 'Final Solution', i.e., kill all the Jews to get that Judenfrei Europe. Not their first plan, but that's where they ended up.

And for this obviously heinous crime, many Nazis were executed after they lost WWII. The crime was not killing Jews, but losing unconditionally. The Allies would have found reasons to execute the Nazis with or without the Holocaust. One British hangman said it bothered him to hang young German girls, but they were convicted of killing Jews and sentenced to death, and he had a job to do.

But the Nazis also wanted to kill all Slavs and take their property for Lebensraum. The Russians, evil Empire that they are, consider this a crime, but to every decent Western person, this was just the patriotic duty of the Wehrmacht, and the US did all they could to protect those who had killed Slavs for Lebensraum. And not just protect them, but give them good jobs helping the US develop the technology to kill Slavs for Lebensraum after WWII.

***

In 1700, there was a huge country most called 'Poland', but the official name was The Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania. The government was a mess, they couldn't get anything done, and the Russian Empire, the Austrian Empire, and Prussia agreed to annex all of The Commonwealth. Russia got about 60%, the Austrian Empire about 20%, and Prussia about 20%.

After WWI, the US demanded the dissolution of all the European Empires. The UK and France said only losers lose their Empires, so Russia lost the Lithuania part of the Commonwealth that became the three Baltic States, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Russia also lost the Ukraine and more to become part of Poland. Germany and Austria lost the bits of Poland that had been part of Germany and Austria (and all their other colonies).

After WWII, the USSR annexed a huge part of Poland and all the Baltic States. The USSR not only took the parts of Poland that had once been part of the Russian Empire, but also parts that had been part of the Austrian Empire.

It gets even more complicated. The part of Poland reclaimed by the USSR included the Ukraine and Belarus. The Ukraine had a lot of former Austrians who hated everything Slavic, so Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev added huge chunks of the Soviet State of Russia to the Soviet State of Ukraine. It was all the USSR, so no one dared complain, and it wasn't really all that big a deal.

Until the Ukraine, with all the formerly Russian bits, broke away from the USSR. They managed to live in peace until 2014 when Victoria Nuland gave the former Austrians lots of money and weapons to take over the Ukraine and say that all ethnic Russians must be removed for Lebensraum. By 2014, Russia were no longer a Third World nation, easily defeated by the Taliban as they were in the 1980s. And the Russian Constitution says Russia must protect ethnic Russians being murdered in the former USSR. The goal was to provoke Russia to attack the Ukraine, and it worked.

The West saw Russia as a cold Saudi Arabia, selling fossil fuels to the West and using the money to buy everything they need from the West, so after Russia attacked the Ukraine to protect the ethnic Russians, the Western media report that the Russian economy was destroyed. Russia had no money for weapons, so they sent everyone they could draft with Soviet and Czarist weapons but very little ammunition to fight the Ukrainians, and more than 600,000 Russians have been killed. Russia now send elderly men and young boys to be slaughtered by the Ukrainians who will soon have their whole country back, while Russia will replace Putin with someone who will let NATO dismantle Russia into about 20 small, unarmed countries, since Russia can easily see that they have no other choice.

As a friend says, to read any Western description of the war in the Ukraine, just replace every 'Ukrainian' with 'Russian' and every 'Russian' with 'Ukrainian'. It is the Ukrainians who have lost most of the forces they sent, more than 300,000 dead, while Russian losses have been far fewer. But the Ukrainian government are bought and paid for by NATO, so they'll do whatever NATO want them to do. And that means lots of dead Ukrainians and a few dead Russians. But NATO figure this will bankrupt Russia and allow NATO to break Russia up into a bunch of small, unarmed countries that can no longer pose the slightest obstacle to NATO.

Most of my life, I saw the US, sometime with and sometimes without NATO, attacking small, third world countries, killing their leadership, and stealing all their natural resources. Didn't always go all that well, but no real danger to any US citizen except those who volunteered to join the US military and kill those foreigners for their natural resources.

But now the US are taking on the world's strongest nuclear power to steal all their natural resources.

Compared with the US leadership, jackasses are geniuses.