[chucker]

Originally Posted by turtle I'm actually surprised no one mentioned it here yet.

Well, even as politics go, it's kind of… a lot. We've had conflicts like Northern Ireland and Yugoslavia, but what's happening these hours could be the biggest war Europe has seen in almost 80 years.

As for Russia's motivation, Ben Rhodes's analysis checked out to me:

I think you can divide this into three pieces: strategic, political, historical. Strategically, NATO and the US-led military alliance has gradually expanded after the Cold War to include countries like Poland and former Soviet republics like Lithuania that border Russia. Russia didn't like that. NATO in 2008 offered membership to Ukraine and Georgia, two former Soviet republics that also border Russia. And Ukraine is the biggest former Soviet republic, and the one with the deepest ties to Russia, historically. Since that offering of the Membership Action Plan, which is a step towards joining NATO, Putin has invaded and occupied two chunks of Georgia, chunks of Ukraine, and now he's escalating there. Clearly, he's seeking to reverse what he thinks is the post-Cold War order that disadvantages Russia. Second is political. Ukraine is a democracy. Ukraine has had two popular revolutions in 2005 and 2013 that ousted pro-Russian leaders, and set the country on a more democratic path. That's a scenario that Putin wants to prevent at home. So, just as he wants a buffer between him and NATO, which is what Ukraine is, he wants a buffer between him and democracy. He wants to stamp out democracy before it can get to Russia, potentially. The last piece is the history. That's what's on display in the speech he gave this week. Putin believes deeply that Russia was humiliated at the end of the Cold War, that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a catastrophe, that we rubbed his face in with the enlargement of NATO. And he thinks this is a part of reclaiming Russia's rightful historical place as a leader in Europe. He thinks, frankly, that Ukraine shouldn't even be an independent country. It has ties with Russia that go back a thousand years, in his view. All these things are converging now for him to make this play.