That as an argument falls apart pretty quickly when you remember they made a blitz attack for Kiev on the first day into areas not expressing a desire to separate.

That logic relies on a big assumption that I don’t agree with, that fighting has to be contained to the specific territory in dispute. If the United States invaded Greenland and Greenland attacked NYC, despite Greenland not having any claim on NYC, that wouldn’t really be a mark against Greenland. It’s a matter of military strategy that if you can destroy enemy capabilities or force them to defend multiple fronts or knock them out entirely, you’ll probably try.

I said the USA did not start this war, and you are saying it was started by local separatists. Which back to the Revolutionary war comparison that’s spot on again

I didn’t exactly say it was started by local separatists. I said that who started it depends on which political entities you consider legitimate. If the separatists are more legitimate than the central government, you could say that the central government started it. In the same way, if you consider the American revolutionaries more legitimate than the British, then you could argue that the British started that war by infringing the American right to self-governance and popular sovereignty.

To use another comparison: the Vietnam War is generally seen as an act of US aggression, but at the time, it was claimed to be a defensive war, protecting the Republic of Vietnam from foreign supplied rebels. The reason that interpretation fell out of favor is because the Republic of Vietnam is generally regarded as having been a Western puppet.

Now, I personally don’t know to what degree each side represents popular will or to what extent they are just proxies of foreign governments. But my point is that if you allow the other user’s claim that the Ukrainian government was set up through US meddling, that significantly muddles the question of who started what.