Thank you for the question.

Russian leaders make the point that the conflict did not begin in February last year. It began eight years before, in February 2014.

That's when an elected Ukrainian President (Viktor Yanukovych) was overthrown in Kyiv by ethnonationalist paramilitaries.

Whether you call what happened a coup, a revolution, or an insurrection, it was vigorously resisted in regions that voted for Yanukovych.

The post insurrection regime was never accepted in the major eastern cities Donetsk and Lugansk, or in Crimea.

Since then, governments in Kyiv have made repeated attempts to bombard Donetsk and Lugansk into submission.

Russia tried to negotiate with the Kyiv régime and its western allies, resulting in the Minsk agreements. But these agreements were never implemented by Kyiv.

Sounds like the NYT and WaPo found Zelensky's so-called peace plan too embarrassing to write about.

His ten points include zero concessions to the communities in the Donbass which Kyiv has been fighting since 2014.

He doesn't refer even to the regional autonomy provided for in the Minsk Agreements of 2014 and 2015, which Ukraine's leaders signed and the UN approved.

Thank you for pointing out the risks of escalation.

There are justice arguments on both sides of this conflict, which has been going on for almost 9 years now. And there are people on both sides who have lost sons and daughters.

Decision makers should beware of the sort of argument which uses past loss of life to make a case for further loss of life.

"Revenge" is a dangerous word, Bob. But it's Zelensky's word, not Scott's.

Since 2014, Ukraine's army and paramilitaries have been at war with people they claim as their own.

If it's courage you admire, why not take a look at the courage of those on the other side?

They too have their heroes and their martyrs.

ChatGPT's story about the time machine contains a historical error. Its premise is that the assassination of Abraham Lincoln triggered the American Civil War. This is clearly wrong, since Lincoln was alive and well when the Civil War broke out in April 1861. He was killed four years later, as the war was finishing. Robert E. Lee, the most important Confederate general, had already surrendered... It looks like the sort of mistake a human would make, so I'd be interested to know whether the error was in your prompt, or whether the AI system got this wrong by itself?