 Yes, it's a proxy war, notes from the edge of the narrative matrix. To be clear, evidence is mounting that this is a proxy war deliberately instigated and perpetuated by the US empire with the goal of ousting Putin, which means that, despite all the narrative window dressing and spin, this war is ultimately just more US regime change interventionism. Saddam Hussein was not a nice person, and he did bad things. This doesn't change the fact that Bush's regime change war was a tremendous evil which unleashed unforgivable horrors, and that it was done because Saddam became inconvenient for the US empire. The same is happening here. As a result of deliberately provoking this war, the US empire has manufactured international consent for unprecedented economic warfare geared toward ousting Putin, drawn Moscow into another Afghanistan-like military quagmire, guaranteed immense profits for the war industry, cutting on Russia's fossil fuel business, and made Europe further subservient to US interests. This is a tweet by Charmin Narvani, a journalist. EU agrees to buy gas from the US, reducing its dependence on Russian gas by one third, in case you wanted to know why Washington provoked war in Ukraine. People say, this is not a proxy war. How dare you call this a proxy war. Pouring billions of dollars worth of weaponry into a foreign nation to be used by CIA trained fighters with the direct ongoing assistance of US military intelligence is in fact the exact thing that a proxy war is. That is what those words mean. If the Ukraine war is not a proxy war, then there has never been a proxy war. People say, so you just think Ukraine should give Putin the Dunbas and Crimea and neutrality just to end a war that Putin started? No, I think Ukraine should sacrifice rivers of blood serving as US proxy cannon fodder for years to drain Moscow while you sit at home eating pop tarts and tweeting. I definitely think every single Ukrainian man, woman and child should be sacrificed to this US proxy war for geo-strategic dominance rather than yield some Russian speaking parts of eastern Ukraine who want to be a part of Russia anyway. Only a Putin loving monster would disagree. The only humanitarian position is to continue the US plan to flood the nation with just enough weapons to bleed Russia without actually winning the war for years to subvert Moscow in the grand chessboard maneuverings of a few sociopaths in Washington. Any Ukrainian mother who wouldn't sacrifice her son for the remote chance of future NATO membership and control over Crimea just loves Putin and thinks Putin is awesome and is a putler apologist. I don't care how many Ukrainian lives must be thrown into the gears of the imperial war machine to accomplish this. Sacrifice every one of them down to the last screaming baby because I hashtag stand with Ukraine until the next stylish hashtag and profile pic filter come along. There'd be a lot more credibility for the argument that Russia has no right to any sphere of influence even over the presence of hostile military alliances directly on its border if the US didn't command a sphere of influence that looks like the planet Earth. NATO is a sphere of influence. It is an extension of US imperial power, one of many. You don't get to unilaterally create a global dynamic and then cry when other countries respond accordingly. It's like the US making international law meaningless by continually flouting it with zero consequences and then claiming another country violated international law. People who say what so Russia should just get to dictate whether its neighbors can join NATO in the EU without addressing US hegemony are either truly ignorant of US hegemony willfully ignorant of US hegemony or supportive of US hegemony. There are no other options and there really is no way to address it in a way that makes Russia's position look unreasonable. It's simply not legitimate to claim Moscow has no right to even the slightest degree of any sphere of influence while the US empire exerts a sphere of influence the size of Earth. Very supportive of Biden's not deliberately obliterating all terrestrial life in a thermonuclear holocaust policy but strongly opposed to his continually escalating cold war and proxy war tensions in ways that could easily and advertently spark a thermonuclear holocaust policy. I still have less than zero respect for the claim that I need to spend more time criticizing Putin as though the criticisms of every single one of the most powerful government and media institutions in the Western world is not enough. I have no influence over Putin. What I do have some small degree of influence over is the Western society that is cheerleading a proxy war which all evidence says is actively being prolonged by the Western empire to bleed Russia at the expense of Ukrainian lives. Saying well Putin could just end his war is about as useful a contribution to the conversation as saying well Ukrainians could just sprout wings and fly to another country. We have the same amount of control over both of those things. I focus my effort where I can do the most good. Demanding that we criticize Putin and the Western powers who provoked and sustain this war equally or anywhere near equally is an absurd position. As badly as my empire loyalist detractors wanted to be true I don't actually have an audience with Vladimir Putin. I have a Western audience. People are going to get poorer and see their quality of life diminishing as a result of the US empire's economic war with Russia. Our civilization has an illness. We're like a cancer patient wasting away as it spreads throughout our body. And the US empire is the malignant tumor.