I don't reckon Russia so easy to provoke. Quite the contrary, this WWIII simulation looks very like Mesoamerican flower wars from the beginning. Both main participants, i.e., China and the US, operate through multi-level proxies that don’t even bother to formally declare war between each other (Ukraine hadn’t, they simply signed dubious unconstitutional martial law decree, and there was that) or to stop trade. That's why, among other reasons, I hadn't really believed into invasion of Russia in February; they would have been obliged to stop oil and gas exports through Ukrainian pipelines, had they formally declared the war. But no, they simply shied away from using that term at all! What we observe is no more than a brutally cynical masquerade ball. Also, Ukraine appears the first country in recent history of the Information Age that gladly surrenders its sovereignty in the name of military industry field testing. Destructive testing, that is.

I’d say the main Russian crime as seen by Democrats and other warmongers in the US is the difference in understanding of the Cold War I finale. Russians, in general, never ascertain themselves as losers in this war, they reckon the dissolution of the USSR a tragic fit that hit the Shan, while American neocons consider themselves triumphant victors, always forgetting that it was Gorbachev who unexpectedly jumpstarted the Perestroika: no one in CIA think tanks was able to discuss this scenario with such prophetic audacity as, say, Lewis Shiner in Frontera or Marc Stiegler in David’s Sling.