Chomsky is right about all this, but I'd like to challenge this idea that Russia was provoked.

What was going on in Ukraine before the Russian invasion was not a "provocation." A provocation is what we have now with America parading its navy up and down the Taiwan strait with a chip on its shoulder. Come on, knock it off, I dare ya! Or North Korea firing another rocket into the Pacific. The only thing that's being hurt is national pride. It can be ignored.

What was going on before was a low intensity civil war between Ukraine and the Russian speaking separatist provinces in the East. Basically, Ukraine was shooting the place up to force those people to submit and some 16,000 people died on both sides over about an eight year period.

Multiple rounds of diplomacy, including the Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 agreements failed to resolve the conflict. After an endless stream of warnings and obvious preparations, Russia finally invaded.

Now, it is pretty easy to call Russia evil for the invasion, but put yourself in their shoes and consider. I've learned that lots of people have trouble doing this, but if you just be honest with yourself and imagine that it was English speakers getting attacked by a foreign power, wouldn't you have acted? Would you really have just sat on your hands and said, "well, it would be wrong to help those Brits or those Aussies because we'd have to invade another country to do it." Really?

Oh, and Whataboutism gets a bad rap. It's a perfectly natural human argument. For example, what about America's endless and essentially unjustifiable invasions of other countries? Have we not killed far, far more people in our wars than Russia? Remember Iraq? Libya? The 75 day bombing run on Belgrade?