Making preparations, offensive, or defensive, is not in and of itself an indicator for war.
Sure but we have a lot more evidence to support the proposition NATO intended this war to occur and deliberately provoked Russia into it.
Back in 2008 William Burns, then US ambassador to Moscow, now head of the CIA, warned that if Ukraine moved toward NATO it would cause a civil war in Ukraine and that would then bring in Russia. This must be exactly why they subsequently enacted policies leading to such a result.
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1502177250300600320
Poroshenko, Merkel and Hollande have all now publically stated that the Minsk agreements were never intended to bring peace and never intended to be fully implimented, rather they intended to delay war until Ukraine was better prepared to fight one, all three then simply must have intended the war to eventually come about.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/12/22/ffci-d22.html
Zelensky advisor Arestovich in 2019 predicted the war with remarkable accuracy and argued he wanted it to come about, otherwise Ukraine would later slip back into siding with Russia by electing another Yanokovych type President. It follows that if he sees such a war as the means to his ends he will seek to bring that war about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwcwGSFPqIo
A report was commissioned from the Rand Corporation on ways to weaken Russia, the report suggested provoking it with Ukraine
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_briefs/RB10000/RB10014/RAND_RB10014.pdf
During the high tension as Russia and Ukraine built up forces, in the week before invasion, Ukraine massively increased shelling of Donbass, as observed by the OSCE. It looked like Ukraine was launching an offensive on Donbass, in such a period of tension that simply must have been intended to provoke Russia in. There is no other credible reason to do this at that time except provocation.
https://www.osce.org/files/2022-02-22%20Daily%20Report_ENG.pdf?itok=63057
I would further argue that the whole Russiagate bullshit was intended to facilitate public opinion in preperation for a war with Russia, similar to the growth of the invasion genre of literature in the UK prior to WW I.
I should also add that I read somewhere, near the begining of the war, an interveiw with Zelensky in which he stated that he was privately told by western leaders that Ukraine would not be admitted to NATO anytime soon, but that publically he and they should maintain the appearence that they will. I can't find the link for this at the moment, but considering they knew this stance provoked Russia, why else would they stick to it, unless they wanted to provoke war?
I agree with you on the tank park number
I would suggest this was one of the points of the Russian northern advance. In the west we are fed the narrative that Russia intended to capture Kiev and was defeated and forced out. I think the northern front was never intended to take Kiev, instead they intended to destroy military infrastructure around Kiev, put pressure on Zelensky for a deal, and keep Ukrainian forces in place until their ability for strategic mobilisation was destroyed. And that means they were destroying tanks in storage around Kiev and everything else to support the maintenance of tanks, that's what happened to Ukraine's tanks, that's why they didn't make it out of maintenance. That cannot be admitted in the west because it detracts from the narrative of Russian defeat, whose function is to get the western public to agree to handing over billions to "Ukraine" (in fact the MIC).
So it's a racket, the politicians vote to hand over billions "for Ukraine" the bulk of that money goes to the Pentagon who use it to buy replacements for equipment they've sent to Ukraine, so it ends up with private arms manufacturers who are raking it in and who then make contributions to the politicians who voted to "give funds to Ukraine". The massive transfer of public funds to private pockets all covered up by the idea we are "helping Ukraine" while the Ukrainians themselves get killed in an avoidable war to weaken Russia for Washington, with the further grand strategic end of preventing or inhibiting Russia from backing up China when the US wants to wreck East Asian development by provoking a war there, thus maintaining US global hegemony. This is why I included the bit about "setting the theatre" around China in the Bierman quote above, it's part of the same strategy, ultimately the Ukraine war is about the rise of China.
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