Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine was not provoked
In 1878 at the end of the Crimean War, the Russian Empire’s borders included Finland, Poland, and Ukraine, stretching from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea. However
Russia ended the Crimean War with minimal territorial losses, but was forced to destroy its Black Sea Fleet and Sevastopol fortifications. Russian international prestige was damaged, and for many years revenge for the Crimean War became the main goal of Russian foreign policy.
This quest for international prestige and the Black Sea never ended.
Russia loses Finland, Poland, and Ukraine after WWI
The Russian Empire, which controlled Finland as a Grand Duchy, was severely weakened by World War I and ultimately dissolved during the Russian Revolution of 1917. This same dissolution created the Ukrainian People’s Republic. This upheaval also allowed Poland, which had been partitioned among Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary for over a century, to re-emerge as an independent nation after the Polish-Soviet war.
Soviet Russia retakes Ukraine 1921
The end of the Second Winter Campaign brought the Ukrainian–Soviet war to a definite end, however, partisan fighting against the Bolsheviks continued until mid-1922, and in response, the Red Army terrorized the countryside.
Soviet Russia retakes Poland but fails to retake Finland
Signed on August 23, 1939, this non-aggression The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union contained a secret protocol that divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence. Poland was one of the countries affected by this division.
On September 17, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland, citing the “cessation of the Polish state” as justification. The invasion was part of a coordinated effort with the German offensive from the west.
However Russia loses the Winter War for Finland.
Russian genocide of Ukrainians — Holodomor
The Holodomor was a mass famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians.
While most scholars are in consensus that the main cause of the famine was largely man-made, it remains in dispute whether the Holodomor was intentional, whether it was directed at Ukrainians, and whether it constitutes a genocide, the point of contention being the absence of attested documents explicitly ordering the starvation of any area in the Soviet Union. Some historians conclude that the famine was deliberately engineered by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. Others suggest that the famine was primarily the consequence of rapid Soviet industrialisation and collectivization of agriculture.
The “remains in dispute” is tenuous bordering on genocide denial as
out of a total 7 million deaths caused by the famine in the Soviet Union, approximately 40% of them were ethnic Ukrainians.
Soviet Russia disbands and Poland and Ukraine gain independence
On 27 October 1991, the 1991 Polish parliamentary election, the first democratic election since the 1920s. This completed Poland’s transition from a communist party rule to a Western-style liberal democratic political system. The last post-Soviet troops left Poland on 18 September 1993. After ten years of democratic consolidation, Poland joined OECD in 1996, NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004.
Similarly the Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine was adopted by the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR on 24 August 1991.
The US has nothing to do with Russian aggression
Attempting to dominate Ukraine and Poland is a 19th century Russian tradition existing long before the US played any role in European politics
The Russian Empire, besides containing Russians, ruled over millions of other Slavs: Ukrainians, Poles and Belarusians, who had their own national identities, traditions and religions. Towards Ukrainians and Belarusians, the Slavophiles developed the view that they were part of the same “Great Russian” nation, Belarusians being called the “White Russians” and Ukrainians “Little Russians” or “Malorussians”. Slavophile thinkers such as Mikhail Katkov (1818–1887) believed that both these nations should be ruled under Russian leadership and were an essential part of the Russian state.[9] At the same time, they denied the separate cultural identity of Ukrainian and Belarusian people,[9] believing that their national as well as linguistic and literary aspirations were a result of “Polish intrigue” to separate them from Russians.
Blaming foreign influence for Ukrainian and Polish desire for independence is just a tactic and it’s a ridiculous tactic that denies national agency altogether.
If you believe that Finland, Poland, and Ukraine should be part of an imperialist Russia, even at the cost of millions of lives, then just say so. The United States is guilty of plenty of atrocities, but this imperialist Russian aggression is a Russian thing or currently maybe even purely a Putin thing.