These were the 'public' talking points. Everyone had been saying this for 10 years. The unspoken part is why we were provoking Russia. What were we doing? We were pushing them to kill 100K's of Eastern Ukrainians. We have been pushing them to genocide any remaining Ukrainians with Russian heritage. They had been doing that under the guise of de-comunization and removing Soviet era support. We pushed them to cut off water to the citizens of the desert peninsula Crimea and we push them to bomb the Dumbass region daily for 9 years.

They worried our pushing Ukraine to genocide Russian Ukrainians would piss off Russia....for some reason.