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Trump has a history of dealing extremely generously with Putin and taking him at his word. If Putin or his representatives told him it was really Ukraine's fault, I would expect Trump to repeat that. It's probably not helping that Zelenskyy recently pointed this out, since Trump is notoriously fragile.
The other half of this is that Trump has the mind of a thug. When the powerful threaten you, you make concessions. If you don't, it's your fault for whatever happens.
Man, I hate this modern trend of journalists smugly injecting their own opinion into reporting. I want to hear what happened and what was said, not what some midwit journalist thinks about it.
Part of what happened is that Ukraine did not, in fact, start it. This is not a disputed fact. Trump is just lying.
"Donald Trump today announced that Incanto was a notorious paedophile and had been taken into custody" and "Donald Trump today falsely accused Incanto of being a notorious paedophile and took him into custody" are very different stories. You should respond to them differently. If a newspaper is able to distinguish between them in its reporting, it should.
Depends on how you're defining "it"
"Russia invaded Ukraine" Is a fact.
"Russia started it" (the invasion) Is a fact.
"Russia started it" (the war) is not a fact.
The definition of starting something isn't as clearly defined and the cause of the Ukraine war is more complicated than who threw the first major blow. They were already in a frozen proxy war after the events of 2014 with occasional shelling prior to the larger invasion.
Finding the exact causes for historical conflict is always more complicated. This is why the propaganda machine keeps trying to reduce it to simplistic terms. "Mommy! Timmy punched me!!!" type child reasoning. Any unbiased adult with any experience with people is going to question what Jimmy did to piss off Timmy.
Like Incanto I find the patronizing obnoxious.
Mongols started it when they invated Kievan Rus, in my opinion.
Kiev was always burning since the world was turning.
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