I think so. I think one could say that Russia could have held off on a military response and I don’t have any strong feelings about that because there is a lot of specifics that I don’t know. But NATO has been prepping up Ukraine to be its proxy in its goal to contain Russia for a decade. This starts off with the Maidan coup and then NATO’s empowerment of Ukraine’s Banderite neo-nazis by the way of providing them arms and training. The neo-nazis had been waging a war against their Russian speaking border regions for about a decade. NATO then blocked any diplomatic solutions to the ensuing tension between Russia and Ukraine. Merkel straight up said that the Minsk Accords that were agreed upon and signed were meant to buy Ukraine time rather than be honoured.

Given this Russia had the options of doing nothing and endure the containment or stymie NATO’s expansion through a pre-emptive invasion. I would have liked if there was no need for a war. But this is just the continuation of USA’s cold war that never ended even after USSR’s dissolution. The fact is that Russia’s mere existence as a sovereign country is something that USA and NATO find deeply offensive. A war like this was bound to happen at one point or another.