Right - Bush "pressed for" Ukraine's membership, but he wasn't successful. And in fact Putin had executed (what he should have seen as) a successful containment strategy by that date, via purely diplomatic means. Sanity prevailed, reason prevailed -- but Putin invaded anyway. That's the key takeaway here.
As to the other tangents, briefly:
(1) No, the Georgia conflict was not "the same exact war". It bears a certain surface similarity, but for what should be obvious reasons, the analogy stops there. In particular Putin's attitude toward (and obsession with) Ukraine is in an entirely different universe from his attitude toward Georgia (the former he sees as basically a part of Russia; the latter merely as a buffer territory).
The situation in Georgia's breakaway regions is also entirely different; the violent aspects of these conflicts there go pretty far back (to the early 20th century, with major flare-ups beginning immediately after the dissolution of the USSR, and major atrocities inflicted by both sides).
There is, simply put, no analogy to be made with the situation with the regions of Ukraine that Putin is attempting to annex - which never saw any violent separatist conflict prior to Putin's invasion via proxy forces in 2014.
In short, there are huge, categorical distinctions between the two conflicts -- describing them as "the same exact war" is really quite silly.
(2) Re: Arakhmiya - your spin here is that the Ukrainians could have just walked away by making basically symbolic concessions (like agreeing not to join NATO), and all would have been well; and that we just don't really know happened because it was all behind closed doors.
This is a false characterization. By now we do have a pretty good idea of what happened, because the proceedings were quite famous and have been thoroughly investigated (for example in the Foreign Affairs article linked to in the thread below). In a nutshell, the concessions the Russians were demanding were not purely symbolic; rather they were demanding not only those, but drastic reductions in force that would have effectively left Ukraine without viable security guarantees of any kind. Against this backdrop there were also the atrocities happening on the ground in Bucha, Irpin and Mariupol, which in addition to providing a certain chilling effect, persuaded the Ukrainians that relying on Russia's good word for their security would not be in their best interest.
(3) There's no analogy between the Ukraine's paramilitaries and jihadists of any kind; that's just scare rhetoric. Once Russia invaded in March 2014, all bets were off -- and any help provided to Ukraine after that date was purely defensive, by definition, end of story.
I am making that analogy, there are so many elements in common, and the analogy to other proxy wars like Yemen too.
You could argue Brzezinski and CIA arming the mujahideen was also “purely defensive”, or Soviets arming the PLO a decade earlier was “purely defensive”. Both are nonsense, of course!
And of course, after Yugoslavia and Libya we know that NATO isn’t a “purely defensive” organization, and its member states like USA sometimes form coalitions to go invade other countries, like Iraq or Afghanistan, and occupy them for years just like the Soviets.
You must not know the history of cold war proxy wars very well to ignore all the parallels and the patterns that repeat and repeat.
Isn’t it a bit silly to just say “period, end of story” and just deny it? This is how people solve problems — by looking at similar situations around the world. You don’t fix a refrigerator by refusing to look at every other refrigerator and treating it as a special snowflake. Same here.
You could argue Brzezinski and CIA arming the mujahideen was also “purely defensive”, or Soviets arming the PLO a decade earlier was “purely defensive”.
One could, but it'd be silly as you already know, and no one is doing that.
Well, they shouldn't do it here either then. The analogy is quite deep since history repeats itself:
CIA training paramilitaries against Russia/USSR
Increasing the chances of Russia invading
Giving ever more weapons to the "freedom fighters"
Country ravaged and destroyed by war
Lots of dead combatants & civilians (needlessly)
Of course the war in Ukraine is like other proxy wars (in Yemen, Afghanistan etc) and can be analyzed by comparing them. For example, Iran did the same with Houthis in Yemen, as US CIA did with far-right paramilitaries in Ukraine. If you call Putin an unelected dictator who bombs a neighboring country to maintain their influence and hegemony rather than let a rival take it over, then what do you call the Saudi monarchy doing that in Yemen? And now that country is ravaged by a decade of needless fighting in a proxy war. In any case, the Ukraine war is not a special snowflake, at all. It's very similar to many other proxy wars.
It's also a war in which Russia invades a country in an attept to bring it to the negotiating table to agree to permanently stop shelling two breakaway republics, very much like with Georgia, so we can see what happened in Georgia (i.e. Russia didn't continue to take over the country, at all) rather than invent fantasy scenarios that Russian orcs want to genocide all Ukrainians, or will go and take over the rest of Europe if they succeed in Ukraine, etc. It is quite reasonable to look at similar situations to infer what the motivations were. And it's NOT reasonable to say "it's all Putin" when every US ambassador said every Russian leader (including Medevedev with Georgia) would react the same way to the "red lines". 73% of the Russian public supports the Ukraine war just like 73% of the US public supported the Iraq war. Public support wars. Similarities matter, and they matter most of all because they help us understand how to prevent and end wars.
For example with Georgia, despite all the similar motivations, and nearly the same actors in similar circumstances, the motivation to say "there is no analogy AT ALL, period, end of story" is that you can then claim Russia will be emboldened and continue its rampage further, if a peace agreement was reached. Most civilians want peace, and don't want carnage, so to justify continued carnage (resulting in 2 million dead civilians in Afghanistan, for instance), you need a narrative that is even worse than sending people to die in wars. So people bring up all kinds of claims (Russia will invade Europe if not stopped here etc.) So if a counterexample is brought up (e.g. Russia didn't continue past 1 week in Georgia) you have to shut it down very quickly. But the analogies are there, and the public's reactions on both sides is similar too:
In the case of Ukraine -- OSS training of partisan forces against the Wehrmacht would be an infinitely closer analogy.
The thing is, you seem to assume axiomatically that the CIA's training of stay-behind forces (a.k.a. "paramilitaries") in Ukraine after 2014 was intrinsically offensive, i.e. was done just to get up Russia's backside, for whatever nefarious purpose.
Well, I don't buy that axiom, the simple reason that after 2014 Ukraine had every right to defend itself, and creating stay-behind forces is just a standard way of doing that. Just as France, Italy, Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece and all the other countries in Europe had a perfect right to resist occupation by Nazi Germany via whatever means necessary and available to them, including the development of partisan forces.
as US CIA did with far-right paramilitaries in Ukraine.
Which "far-right paramilitaries" are you referring to? You seem to be confusing the stay-behind forces described in the article with quasi-independent militias like Azov. The two are entirely different, sharing nothing in common other than the slightly scary-sounding keyword "paramilitary" you keep latching onto.
Yet in your mind, they've fused into one and the same entity. Why is that?
It's also a war in which Russia invades a country in an attempt to bring it to the negotiating table to agree to permanently stop shelling two breakaway republics
Again, the Ukrainian regions on Putin's smash-and-grab list were never "breakaway republics" in the mold of Ossetia and Abkhazia, as has already been pointed out. There was no violent "conflict" of any kind in those regions until Putin's little green men began arriving in March 2014. There's just no analogy here. Doesn't matter how often you attempt to simply repeat it.
Nor did the 2022 invasion have anything to do with "stopping the shelling" in those regions -- that's just another talking point that people read somewhere and keep repeating and repeating, with no idea of what they're talking about, because there's simply no substance to it. In any case, it's definitely not why Putin launched the full-scale invasion.
Rather than invent fantasy scenarios that Russian orcs want to genocide all Ukrainians,
It's a fantasy scenario in your own head, because no one has ever suggested that Russia intends to "genocide all Ukrainians". That's just a straw man, with simply no substance behind it.
With that, I'm going to have to bow out, and let you figure this stuff out on your own. It's one thing to have different viewpoints about what these big awful governments and their respective agencies are up to. But we're nowhere near that kind of discussion. I just have the sense that you're extremely careless in your research, or are reading from very propagandized sources, or just not pausing to think critically about whatever stuff it is that you do read.
As to the other tangents, briefly:
(1) No, the Georgia conflict was not "the same exact war". It bears a certain surface similarity, but for what should be obvious reasons, the analogy stops there. In particular Putin's attitude toward (and obsession with) Ukraine is in an entirely different universe from his attitude toward Georgia (the former he sees as basically a part of Russia; the latter merely as a buffer territory).
The situation in Georgia's breakaway regions is also entirely different; the violent aspects of these conflicts there go pretty far back (to the early 20th century, with major flare-ups beginning immediately after the dissolution of the USSR, and major atrocities inflicted by both sides).
There is, simply put, no analogy to be made with the situation with the regions of Ukraine that Putin is attempting to annex - which never saw any violent separatist conflict prior to Putin's invasion via proxy forces in 2014.
In short, there are huge, categorical distinctions between the two conflicts -- describing them as "the same exact war" is really quite silly.
(2) Re: Arakhmiya - your spin here is that the Ukrainians could have just walked away by making basically symbolic concessions (like agreeing not to join NATO), and all would have been well; and that we just don't really know happened because it was all behind closed doors.
This is a false characterization. By now we do have a pretty good idea of what happened, because the proceedings were quite famous and have been thoroughly investigated (for example in the Foreign Affairs article linked to in the thread below). In a nutshell, the concessions the Russians were demanding were not purely symbolic; rather they were demanding not only those, but drastic reductions in force that would have effectively left Ukraine without viable security guarantees of any kind. Against this backdrop there were also the atrocities happening on the ground in Bucha, Irpin and Mariupol, which in addition to providing a certain chilling effect, persuaded the Ukrainians that relying on Russia's good word for their security would not be in their best interest.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41812302
(3) There's no analogy between the Ukraine's paramilitaries and jihadists of any kind; that's just scare rhetoric. Once Russia invaded in March 2014, all bets were off -- and any help provided to Ukraine after that date was purely defensive, by definition, end of story.