I guess nobody explained to them that the west is now deindustrialized and doesn’t have the capacity to produce munitions in the numbers this proxy war requires.
Did you bother watching the lecture from Mearsheimer that the slides are from? It provides a lot of background and explains why Russia took action. The French documentary details what was happening since 2014, but I’ve also linked a CNN clip saying the same things more briefly. Hopefully you’ll agree that CNN isn’t spreading Russian propaganda.
Fundamentally, the explanation Russia gives is precisely the same that NATO had for intervening in Yugoslavia, and is in fact directly modelled on it. Just as NATO did, Russia recognized independence of the separatist regions, then these regions asked Russia to intervene on their behalf, which Russia did.
Prior to taking action, Russia tried to work with the west and Ukraine to implement Minsk agreements for 8 years. Western leaders have now come out and openly said that these were never intended to be implemented faithfully, and were used as a delaying tactic to arm Ukraine. Stoltenberg has now publicly admitted that NATO expansion was a major factor in the start of the war as well:
The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.
The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_218172.htm
Finally, we now know that Russia and Ukraine had a draft peace agreement first two months into the war that the west sabotaged. The agreement effectively amounted to Ukraine staying neutral and actually implementing Minsk. The fact that the west refused to go along with that makes it pretty clear who actually wanted the war all along.
In fact, RAND famously published a study titled ‘Extending Russia’ that outlines how Russia could be goaded into a conflict in Ukraine, and why that would benefit US interests https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3063.html
