re: Why is this board pro-Russia and Putin all of a sudden?

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Because his KGB colleagues let Boris Yeltsin know they were going to arrest Yeltin’s daughter and son-in-law for corruption involving plundering Aeroflot Airlines which the son-in-law was Chairman of.

So, Yeltsin agreed to appoint Putin prime minister and then resign the presidency a couple of months later which meant Putin would ascend to be president in compliance with the Russian constitution.

And that’s how a former KGB agent in East Germany who found work in St. Petersburg driving a taxi after the USSR fell became President of Russia.

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Right. That was late in the Yeltsin game though, as you know.

I know I'm preaching to the choir here, as you know this stuff better than I. But during Yeltsin's tenure, Russia’s economy was chaotic, brutal, and transformative all at once. When he took over in 1991 after the Soviet collapse, the country was a mess. Centralized planning tanked. Shortages were rampant. Inflation spiraled.

Yeltsin introduced price controls, while pushing hard for rapid shifts to a market economy. We should have "Marshall planned" with him at that point, but we were in our own political transition. Russian price controls were lifted in 1992, and hyperinflation hit, peaking at over 2,500% that year. People’s savings got wiped out, and basic goods became unaffordable overnight.

Privatization was the other big move. State-owned enterprises—everything from oil to factories—were sold off, often dirt cheap in a combination of corruption and inexpertise. Again, there should have been huge opportunities for western partnerships there which happened to some extent, but c'est la vie.

Instead it was a period which birthed the oligarchs. They snatched up assets like Gazprom or Yukos for pennies on the dollar. By 1996, a tiny elite controlled huge swaths of the economy, while most Russians saw living standards plummet. Meanwhile we broke the not one inch eastward NATO promise. So with Russia's internal situation still in the tank, we piled on externally.

GDP shrank by about 40% from 1991 to 1998, worse than the U.S. Great Depression drop. Unemployment soared, and bartering became common as cash dried up. The 1998 financial crisis was the low point. Russia defaulted on its debt, the ruble crashed, and banks folded. Yeltsin drowned his woes in vodka.

Then came Putin and the scenario you laid out.

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Putin isn’t taking shite from the globalists and globohomo.

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This war has frick-all to do with globalists and queers. It's about demography, resources, and geography. Nothing more.

It has to do with all of it.

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Putin wouldn't have sent over 100K men to their deaths just to protect Russia from the homo influence. This is just his last-ditch effort to defend the indefensible.

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The Donbas is loaded with natural resources (coal, etc). Natural resources in the Russian-occupied areas comprise the majority of it, and are estimated at over $12 trillion of the Donbas' ~$14 trillion total in coal and rare earths.

Many bright people would assign that and expansionism as the near sole basis for Russia's 2022 incursion. If that was the case though, the question is why not invade in 2014 when the area first broke into civil war? Ukraine was in political disarray. It was militarily unprepared, economically weak, and vulnerable.

Instead, Russia pushed for regional autonomy which Minsk I & II pretended to grant. In reality, Minsk was never a good faith effort, though it took Russia years to fully realize it. Long mistreated, ethnic Russians in Ukraine's eastern oblasts continued in a nasty civil war for autonomy. Putin made convincing arguments in behalf of that autonomy. Retrospectively it's obvious the value of natural resources in the area, along with corruption, precluded any chance of Ukraine actually granting the region even a modicum of freedom. Nonetheless, up to the literal eve of invasion, Putin was open to a premise of further autonomy negotiations. Within days of the invasion, in talks w/ Macron, Macron basically told Putin to pound sand regarding autonomy (in stark contrast to the Minsk agreements).

Meanwhile, at the NATO summit in June 2021 NATO reaffirmed Ukraine would become a member, while President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pushed for an actual Membership Action Plan. During the Fall, Zelenskyy continued to press for faster NATO accession. The US leaked those requests to Moscow. In response, Putin firmly labeled Ukraine-NATO membership as a "red line" and demanded security guarantees in several dialogues with the EU/US that NATO would not expand further eastward. Failure of NATO affiliates to acquiesce, or even discuss the precept, formed a central issue in Russia’s justification for the Feb'22 invasion.

In the end, there are no good guys in this. It was thoroughly avoidable. It's a sad, stupid affair.

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It was thoroughly avoidable.

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Not really. The reason that Europe has been in a state of perpetual war up until 1945 (when we enforced peace upon them) is geography. The Northern European Plain has no barriers to movement, so countries are always in each other's faces and fighting. Notice that Iberia hasn't really been part of Europe's wars. That's because the Pyrenees Mountains have protected them from the conflicts of the wider continent. During the post-war Soviet period, Russia was as geographically secure as it could possibly be, but communism couldn't generate the capital to maintain it, so it fell. Now the Russians are trying re-establish those geographical blocking positions of the NEP and Bessarabian Gap. The problem is that Russia is flush with resources, but has thousands of miles of wide open borders to defend and a dwindling population to try to defend them.