Sorry, but as was shown in WWII, the survival of one's country, one's nation, one's culture, one's way of life - not to mention one's OWN civilian population - justifies a "Special Military Operation".

There is a reason that Putin has used this year's Victory Day celebrations to draw a clear connection between what is going on in Ukraine and Russia's WWII struggle to defeat Nazi Germany.

That said, it should also be noted that civilian casualties in this conflict are exceedingly low - BY DESIGN.

From the very beginning, Putin did not want to pursue a scorched earth policy; there was never any "shock and awe" invasion such as the US perpetrated on Iraq. The SMO was designed to push Ukraine and the West to the negotiating table, because they had been refusing for years if not decades to address Russia's existential security concerns.

The SMO was literally a last resort that Putin fell back on after all other avenues had failed.

I know that many in the West (and you may be among them) do not understand and/or acknowledge the existential threat that Russia perceives in the looming "NATO-ization" of Ukraine. But that threat does exist. Neither you nor anyone else in the West get to dictate to Putin what does and does not pose a threat to Russia - that is for Russia to decide.

The role of the West is to address those concerns and accommodate Russia's security requirements, as they were explained, laid out in detail and presented over and over and over again since Putin first raised them at the Munich Security Conference in 2007.

Rather than listen and deal with Russia, however, the US (under GW Bush) went precisely in the opposite direction. Scant months after Putin raised his concerns about NATO expansion, Bush forced NATO to declare an "open door" invitation to Ukraine and Georgia.

Bush called this "laying down a market", but it was in reality a clear provocation.

I will not go into further detail, but suffice it to say that the seeds of the 2022 SMO were planted in 2008.