Ukraine

Here's my tinfoil hat theory:

NATO and maybe US used Ukraine. They meddled in elections in Ukraine, just like how Russia, China, and everyone else does to every other country. There's a wave of demonstrations in 2013 and 2014 that lead to Zelenskyy, who genuinely sounds like he is actually a good president to be elected, but there was just enough foreign intervention to help that happen to allow Russia to claim that the elections were false. Russia then used existing (and earned) anti-Russian sentiment to take over Crimea. There's also historic reasons (not good ones) for people in Crimea to be more pro USSR. They annexed Crimea because they knew that Ukraine could not join NATO if there was an existing land dispute. They did that with Georgia and "South Ossetia" years earlier and it worked. My theory is that NATO/US saw the Russian invasion coming. So, they made it look like they were going to invite Ukraine into NATO in order to provoke Russia to invade. Putin, being an evil pizda went for it thinking that he could take Ukraine in three days (after 5 years of propaganda and assisting pro-Russian rebels). But that didn't work out, and now NATO/US are using Ukraine as a proxy war to weaken Russia who they see as a natural enemy.

And if anyone reads this thinking that I'm taking some pro-Russian stance, read it again. Fuck Putin. The victims here are Ukrainians and Russians that are fooled into thinking that they're doing the right thing.