If I came across as promoting that viewpoint, it was unintentional. When I said the US has had a hand, it meant exactly that. I never said the US created this war. My entire post addressed a much stronger case for the US using this conflict to display power. Quote that too next time please, instead of addressing one paragraph, before calling it weak.
Those two are functionally synonyms in the minds of most. Having a hand in something = having some level of responsibility for something. The U.S. has no levels of responsibility in Russia fighting this war, except in the minds of some Russian paranoiacs (“NATO and the US are seeking to encircle us so they can eventually destroy Mother Russia!”).
The U.S. does have a rooting side, both for moral reasons (to oppose unjust aggression) and geopolitical realpolitik (a weakened Russian military is a better Russian military as long as Putin is in charge). But the U.S. did not “have a hand” in creating or starting this war.
In the thread title you explicitly ask if the “US is to blame for Russia’s invasion”. To me that means that if the US had not acted the way it did the invasion would not have happened. You can’t “blame” someone for something that would have happened no matter how they acted.
This is getting silly, but what I said was that the US had a hand in creating the situation. Russians fleeing Russia, that situation.
I didn’t start any thread with that title
OK, I missed that this was a mod generated spinoff from another thread.
That explains the wild accusations, and not just from you.
Yeah, but it didn’t 
. Russians are fleeing Russia because they don’t want to get drafted into a war Russia started out of sheer irredentist aggression. The United States literally had fuck all to do with Putin’s adventurism, except as I said in the minds of a certain breed of Russian conspiracy theorists.
If you’re arguing for instance that U.S. material support for Ukraine is keeping Russia from winning the war, which in turn is forcing them to draft Russians, which in turn is creating a refugee flood - well, that’s just a bad argument. Russian response to not being able to win a quick war should be to acknowledge defeat and sign a peace treaty surrendering every shred of Ukrainian territory back to Ukraine as established in 1991.
I’m quite fine with the U.S. taking as many Russian refugees as it can, but that’s just morality. It has zero to do with responsibility.
I think that’s the wrong way to think about it.
You can get intelligence through open means (satellite images, Internet posts, etc.), electric means (wiretaps, etc.), and through human sources. The US is probably strong in the former two but it’s probably the third that matters the most.
Developing sources requires handlers and those have to be allocated around the entire world. There’s only so many people who can do it and, probably, they’re less effective when they look foreign because people can’t be seen with them.
Ultimately, we’re going to be strong in places that we target and where we have a lot of people who can fit in, in that locale. Russia, yes, North Korea, no because we stick out like a sore thumb. Macedonia also probably not, but mostly because we’re not interested in them.
But, also, people can sometimes just send you stuff. Work all day to develop sources and it might not really matter if people just send you info on their own.
There’s every chance that someone in Russia outed Putin, of their own free will, just to try and stop the madness in advance.
But the announcement of it, for the entire world to see? Absolute power move
I have only noticed one wild accusation in this thread. Putin as Oliver Hardy-“Now look what you made me do!”
Ridiculous.
Gee, there was a way to release the information to just part of the world?
Knowing that an invasion was imminent and keeping it a secret would have been an absolute dick move.
How so? Anyone with half a brain could see what Russia was up to.
Not really. Nations perform military exercises all the time. The US declaring that it was an impending invasion was absolutely deliberate.
Just to add to the pile on:
This isn’t really true, either. If NATO really wanted to show its absolute superiority, this would have been over in a month.
So you would have the U.S. lie, either overtly or by omission, and Putin would have conducted a simple “military exercise” and then taken his troops home?
There were considerations to me made about providing too much aid. Lest the Russians take it as a provacation. The goal was to wear them down with out providing so much that it would make them afraid that they might lose.
No I am just saying things that happened
Are you perhaps saying them in another thread?