If you think the war is about NATO I would recommend getting a taste of the bile and vitriol that politicians, propagandists and pundits pour out on the main Russian TV channels nightly, making Sky after Dark look like a Greens branch meeting. They regularly make genocidal claims in line with Putin’s belief (observed as early as 1992) that Ukraine isn’t a real country deserving an independent existence.

For an anecdote that puts another nail in the proxy war claim, go no further than War and Punishment, by exiled Russian journalist Mykhail Zygar, who has excellent sources among Kremlin insiders. As Zygar tells it, Putin and his billionaire crony and bagman Yuri Kovalchuk cooked up the invasion during the Covid pandemic, when Putin spent lots of time pondering on how to retrieve Russia’s imperial glory.

Source: Ukraine: Putin’s war or proxy war? – Pearls and Irritations