why russia went to war;

In April 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky received 73% of the run-off vote and was elected President of Ukraine on a platform that featured making peace with Russia and signing the Minsk Agreement. The Minsk Agreement offered autonomy to the Donetsk and Lugansk regions of the Donbas that had voted for independence from Ukraine after the 2014 US backed coup.

But despite the massive peace mandate, Zelensky was pushed off the path of diplomacy by ultranationalists who, wielding power beyond their small support, threatened Zelensky "if he continues along this line of negotiating with Putin," according to the late Stephen Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Politics and director of Russian Studies at Princeton. Under the force of this pressure, Zelensky was, Professor of Russian and European Politics at Kent Richard Sakwa told me, "thwarted by the nationalists." Reversing the campaign promise upon which he was elected, Zelensky now refused to talk to the leaders of the Donbas and implement the Minsk Agreements.

Receiving none of the support he needed from the US to be able to stand on his election platform, Zelensky was pushed off it. The US also applied no pressure to push him back on. Sakwa says that "As for Minsk, neither the US nor the EU put serious pressure on Kiev to fulfil its part of the agreement." "They did nothing to push Ukraine into actually implementing it," Anatol Lieven, senior research fellow on Russia and Europe at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told me........read more.......