Ukraine is a unique country. Unlike any other country that loses territories, Ukraine was given territories less than 100 years ago. Ukraine’s 1991 border includes Russian, Romanian, Hungarian and Polish territories. The people from these territories, except Russian territories, are not related in anyway to the Ukrainian people. Ukrainian language is a slightly altered Russian language that is just as different from Russian language as Scottish or Irish language is different from the English Language. Yet Ukrainian people and Russian people have different political aspirations.
After the 2014 Coup d’etat, that installed a pro-western leader in Kiev, the Russian speaking people in the ex-Russian territories already declares their independence creating 2 new republics:
The Donetsk People’s Republic and The Luhansk People’s Republic
These 2 territories claim to be just as independent from Kiev as Ukraine claims to be independent from Moscow already since 2014.
Ukraine had 8 years (until the war started) to become a federation that can handle the administration of territories where people speak different languages and have a different nationality already defined and assumed, instead of starting a Nationalism imposed agenda in all its territories. It would have been a way forward. Who knows?!
The Russian invasion in February 2022 is not an invasion to steel territories, is the last resort solution to assist population from Russian speaking territories that belonged to Russia not long ago to exert their own desired political will, as they themselves declared to the new pro-European government that abusively took power in 2014: “We do not have relatives in Europe, but we have so many in Russia”.
For Romanians, Hungarians, Russians and Polish people, the territorial integrity argument would bring in front a different map.
As a Romanian myself, NATO member already since 2004, I can say that NATO membership is not a cause big enough to die for.
So, I personally consider that the territorial integrity and NATO membership are not the real reason behind the Ukrainian conflict. The real reason is the shifting of the “spheres of influence” between 2 superpowers: Western World and Russia, hence the negotiations are to be held between the Western World and Russia not between Ukraine and Russia.
Russian army position is to assist these territories as allies and as future federation members and Ukraine’s interventions in these 2 republics and other ex-Russian territories where Russian speaking people live will be carefully judged at the end of the war and most probably qualified as invasive and genocidal.