Odd phrasing because Kyiv's existence not only predates Moscow, but for most of the time that Kyiv was under Russian control, the capital of the Russian Empire was actually St. Petersburg, not Moscow. [UWSL]Maybe it's just me but whenever one offers a purely historical argument to suggest that a war is more legitimate than another, it ends up being extraordinarily flimsy and their logic applied extremely selectively. [/UWSL]
Seems interesting that some people will very readily condemn the United States' invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 but not the Soviet invasion in 1979, which set the stage for the Taliban's rise in the 1990s. When the Russians intervened in Syria in 2015, sent Wagner fucksticks to the Central African Republic, were they also securing territory held by Moscow for most of its history? [UWSL]I also wonder whether you would be alright if the Germans retook Königsberg, the Japanese the Kuril Islands, or if you'd denounce it as "U.S.-backed aggression". [/UWSL]
[UWSL]The major difference between the United States' interventions over the last three decades and Russia's actions in Ukraine is that territorial conquest was not part of the United States' ambitions, even if some of those interventions may have been strategic errors. And countries have largely sworn off territorial conquest in the post-war world, which makes Russia's actions particularly brazen. [/UWSL]