One of my goals with this privacy thing is to be able to research real topics and get to some reasonable version of the truth without fear. Main stream news is garbage but maybe it's a good place to find topics and then get to what's really going on.
I start by searching duckduckgo for news. First result is Fox News, second is CNN. The top story at Fox is Russia invasion of Ukraine appears imminent. Hmmm, that's funny. I thought they were pulling back just yesterday. I'll leave CNN for another time when Fox is too boring. Let's dig deeper.
Now, about Russia/Ukraine I've heard conflicting accounts and giving them some credit, I don't imagine Russia is blood thirsty. There is significant cost on all sides to war. The best theory I'm aware of goes like this..
In the cold war, there was Russia and the US. Russia and communism did the whole domino effect thing into Asia while the US and western Europe put together NATO for mutual defense.
NATOs here all protecting freedom and democracy while USSR and other communist countries are trying to make their thing work but the reliance on central planners makes them quite a bit less competitive. Corruption is universal. The devil is in the details whatever your political system and though representative democracy seems best in theory I don't like much of what I see anywhere. Point is, these two systems fought it out and USSR plain collapsed while the US took the route of becoming a corporate shell of itself.
If you look at a map of Europe and Russia, Latvia and Lithuania are part of NATO but other countries that border Russia like Belarus and Georgia are not. Ukraine has the highest GDP of it's immediate western neighbors so it seems important enough. Finally as of a 2018 article referenced by NATO's Wikipedia page, “NATO currently recognizes Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, and Ukraine as aspiring members.”
So my understanding is that Russia prefers to have some buffer zone against NATO lands and I'm more likely to believe that NATO (US) is pushing into Ukraine and provoking this response than that Putin is being maniacal and foolhardy. I know I can't trust the usual news suspects so am looking for more information that makes sense. Maybe like the masks that Fauci said not to wear to save it for the front line, there's a good reason for the narrative. Would be great if someone could straight-talk clarify this one. Is this about money? Power? Hackers?