Secretary of State Marco Rubio once again demonstrates he’s either got no clue about what’s going on or intentionally distorting the nature of the #Russia invasion on #Ukraine

They are literally fighting over a 30-50 km strip in Donetsk, roughly 20% of the region still under Ukrainian control and now a central issue in negotiations.

If it was the case - if Russia was after Donbas from the start, they would just push full force there in 2022, and they would win that with the initial invasion force (200k). But they didn’t - they attacked on all directions, including the capital Kyiv passing through #Belarus and #Chornobyl. The original objective was a flash military coup, replacing the Ukrainian government with puppet regime and political control over the whole country.

Russia never abandoned this goal, which it says explicitly all the time, with the insistence on the “removal of root causes”, which is an euphemism of the above - to say that bluntly, root case being Ukraine’s sovereignty.