[Harry Lime]

It's also about the annexation of Crimea by Putin. If he wanted to protect his deep water port from being a part of NATO, he picked the most violent and antagonistic way of making sure that didn't happen. If anything that pushed Ukraine towards NATO membership, and he has to know that would be the result of his actions.

A lot of parallels can be made to Kennedy, but the Bay of Pigs invasion was a small group of Cuban exiles backed by the US, not the US itself, and the USSR later tried to physically place nukes, not open negotiation.

What's happening in Ukraine is the equivalent of if Al Capone was President instead of Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The news in Russia also seems to be painting this entirely as a conflict with the US and Ukraine is an afterthought.

This seems like a failure by both Russia and the West to effectively create an economic power of Ukraine. The country has been a lot more poor and unstable than it should have been since the falling of the Soviet Union. Putin has had decades to strengthen Ukraine as a buffer and an ally, and instead strewn discord. On the other side, the West has used Ukraine for a quick economic gain while ignoring the fragility of the political system, because that suited them from a business standpoint.