Michael, first of all, thank you for reading my article, and thank you for your very useful comment. Indeed, I realise that I may have been assuming too much on the part of the reader when I wrote this piece.

The term "proxy war" is freighted with a broader meaning. It implies that the West "wanted" the war, planned the war, and prepared to fight the war using a "proxy" - in this case, Ukraine.

This is, of course, demonstrably true. The planning for the Ukraine proxy war started in 1947, when the CIA recruited Stepan Bandera and other OUN-B fascists (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists) as "assets" to use against the Soviets. Much to the chagrin of the Russians and especially the Poles, the USA continued to shelter and protect Bandera until his death, giving him a comfortable life in West Germany in return for his help in undermining Russia using Ukrainian Nationalist forces.

The CIA had very elaborate plans to use the Ukrainian Nationalist forces as proxies to "pry" Ukraine out of the Soviet orbit. This was ALWAYS the plan, and indeed, when Zbigniew Brzeziński, Clinton's NSA, wrote his book The Grand Chessboard in 1997, he was merely stating the obvious by saying “Ukraine is the critical state, insofar as Russia’s future evolution is concerned.” He says, “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”

That was the plan: turn Russia into a backwater third tier regional power by taking away Ukraine.

So this proxy war has been in the makings for a long time.

The so-called "Orange Revolution" the CIA staged in Ukraine in 2005 was part of this. That operation failed, but the US just "doubled down" and continued to pour resources and assets - both covert an overt - into Ukraine in order to get it to spin away from Russia and toward the West. In fact, shortly after the Maidan Coup in 2014, the infamous Victoria Nuland even told Congress: "The USA has invested some $5 billion in Ukraine since 1991..." - that is an AWFUL lot of money. But now we know it was just the first drops in the giant proxy bucket that the US has made out of poor Ukraine.

We know now, thanks to the admissions of Merkel and Hollande, that the Minsk Accords were also just a ploy to "buy time" to allow the West to send even more arms and training to Ukraine and prepare them for the proxy war that the West ALWAYS KNEW WAS COMING. That is what Merkel said. That is what Poroshenko said. That is what Hollande said.

So yes, "proxy" means a planned war of aggression prosecuted through a third party". In the case of the USA's war against Russia, that proxy is Ukraine.

Thanks again for your good critique ofd the article. I am going to try to edit it and make it more clear. :-)