eric zuesse provides an in depth history of the ukraine war in case you haven't followed it since its beginning in 2014;

In order to understand the agendas and baggage that Trump and Putin (and their respective ‘news’-media) will be bringing to the Putin-Trump private meeting on Friday August 15th, an honest history of the war in Ukraine is absolutely essential.

As will be documented via the links here, the war in Ukraine started actually on 20 February 2014 when a long-planned bloody 7-day coup by U.S. President Barack Obama’s agents to overthrow the democratically elected internationally neutralist President of Ukraine and replace him by a rabidly anti-Russian leader appointed by Obama’s neoconservative agent who organized the coup, Victoria Nuland (of “Fuck the EU!” fame on that occasion) succeeded at all of the coup’s objectives except capturing and transforming into a U.S. naval base, which still remains Russia’s largest naval base. Ever since 1783, that naval base has been located in Crimea, which since 1954 had been Ukraine’s only independently administered — or “Autonomous” — Province (or “Oblast”) because the people there have, for hundreds of years, considered themselves to be Russians and a part of Russia, which they actually were until 1954, when the Soviet dictator arbitrarily transferred Crimea to Ukraine.

Obama wanted the U.S. Government to control Ukraine so that America could position its nuclear missiles at the Russian border with Ukraine, less than a five-minute striking-distance away from hitting the Kremlin in Moscow so as to decapitate Russia’s central command. As both NATO’s Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s Zelensky have said, this war started in 2014, and NOT in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine (as the liars allege that the war in Ukraine started). Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was instead Russia’s last-ditch effort to PREVENT there ever being ANY nuclear weapon from the U.S. or its colonies (‘allies’) from EVER being able to be positioned in the closest of all nations’ borders to the Kremlin, Ukraine. (Similarly, in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK was determined to prevent any Soviet nuclear missiles from ever being positioned in Cuba, a 15-minute missile-flight from decapitating America’s central command in DC.)............more......