I'm married to a Russian woman who was born and raised in the Ukrainian part of the former USSR and both my kids speak fluent Russian.

You should know, Putin is a ruthless dictator who will kill you for saying the wrong thing.

But the smoking gun in this Ukrainian situation is the fact that senior American diplomats have been warning their own government, since the mid 90's, to stop military expansion to the east. For fear of exactly this situation the world now finds itself in.

Back then Russia was not a threat. The USSR had just collapsed. There was no need to further build up defences in Western Europe against Russia.

If the US followed the advice of their own advisers, chances are Putin wouldn't have amassed the power he did. Because like any good politician he's riding on the emotions of people, and the flames of those emotions have been fanned for decades, by a constantly growing threat, creeping in from the west.

So if you ask, who's the agressor in Ukraine? Obviously it's Putin.

But the question you should be asking is, who spawned him?

And the answer to that is that the existence of Putin is a reaction to an incessant desire for conflict, to the extent that conflict must be created when there is none.

And it is undeniable that this effort to create conflict has, since World War 2, and particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union, been led by the US and its militray industrial complex.

It is the same story over and over again: create the enemy to justify the fight you want. Drunk idiots do it in bar fights, and this is no different. Except these guys aren't drunk on alcohol, but on something far more potent: power.

Bearded terrorists living caves, then Putin, then China. That's what you get when you spend more than half a century fomenting conflict to feed the beast.

I'm not defending what Putin is doing and if you think that's I'm doing, you're approaching this conversation with that same conflict driven mindset.

What I'm saying is: if you want to do something constructive, address the root cause of the problem.

Because even if Putin were to magically dissappear off the face of the planet tomorrow, the beast's desire for conflict would only foment it elsewhere.

And it's already clear where it's likely heading to next.