I’d frame the “obsession” in another way. Currently, in the present, the actual present, Russia claims and has control over some territories. Other countries reject this on the premise that those territories, before the invasion, were Ukrainian. Putin’s stance is simply that, before being Ukrainian, those territories were Russian, so the position that they should belong to one or the other is indeed arbitrary.

The Donbass was basically invaded by Ukrainian troops in 1918, and Crimea was literally gifted to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954, so why should those territories even be under Ukrainian control in the first place, if the majority of their population is culturally Russian? When Albanians in Kosovo started to protest against Serbia, NATO bombed Yugoslavia; now Russians in the Donbass are protesting against Ukraine, so why doesn’t NATO intervene? Why does NATO support Ukraine against an operation identical to that which NATO itself performed? Well, the answer is simple: NATO bombed Yugoslavia to weaken it, and, as McGregor admitted, the US was planning for Ukraine to attack first. We could also draw a parallelism to the Cuban missile crisis: why is it okay to put missiles in Ukraine but not Cuba?

So, all of this nonsense about aggression, culture, etc. is ridiculous. The US and Russia are fighting each other, both on the battlefield and in the media. There’s no ethics here, both will do whatever it takes (the list of American, Russian and Ukrainian war crimes is nauseating) and will weaponize public opinion as they would weaponize missiles or rifles. There’s no lesser evil, just pure evil everywhere, just think about what the victory of either side would bring about to the world, then choose your evil.