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Notes -
My understanding is that some amount of actual stealing took place and was admitted to early on (the 2005 end of the dispute), and after that it was mostly arcane contractual disputes which can best be approximated by something like: Russia was selling gas to Ukraine at well-below-market/charity rates while it was a puppet state, but wanted to start charging market after they had the revolution to bring in the pro-Western guy, which Ukraine couldn't afford (and they might already have been in arrears from before), and so UA decided to basically hold westward transit hostage to demand continued sub-market deliveries (and may either have stolen gas from transit attempts, or asserted a contractual right to take it; hard to find objective information); while the Western states, having alternatives and not liking the idea that Ukraine would be incentivised with cheap gas to not be pro-Western, approved of this process.
This means as little in the context as if Russia found "proof", since the EU wanted to back their own puppet. If we wanted objective information, perhaps we should have put an Indian investigative team on the case as they did in the Korean war...
Eh. My reading is that at least in several of the post-'90s conflicts, their moral batting average was pretty average. I do think it was evil on the strategic level that they essentially wanted to keep Ukraine perpetually poor and dependent, though the exact ways in which they did it seem more business-as-usual to me; on the other hand, e.g. in Georgia 2008, I think they were morally in the right (Georgia shot first, and I don't see their moral claim to the separatist areas). Chechnya, and the quite possibly false-flag apartment bombings - evil, for sure (though I think the Chechens were/are also a nasty bunch, so it was black-on-dark-grey warfare like the US invasion of Afghanistan). In the case of Transnistria, I also don't see Moldova's moral claim.
More importantly, though, I think it doesn't matter because orthogonally to interior politics, the post-WWII US (and friends) is more evil than Russia. (I mean, just in this year, Israel has killed more civilians in Gaza than Russia has in Ukraine for the whole duration of the war!) I'd rather have zero tyrants on the world stage than one, but if we have to have at least one, I'd rather have 2+, so they at least have to throw some morsels to us in the NPC countries occasionally lest we all align with the respective other. When I argue against the morality of the US camp, it's strictly in the service of the implications of this viewpoint: a world in which every credible challenger to the US has been neutered is worse than the one we currently inhabit.
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