bloobeary: Grain, cars, washing machines, clothing, toys....

This wasn't so much a war, as a massive armed robbery.

Let's not forget the civilians that have been scooted across the border too.

This IS about robbery. Kleptograts need new feeding grounds. They've pretty much wrung the rag out on Russia, and they NEED new targets. International trade is OK, but their efforts are already eroding their commercial space launch programs. They have natural resources still, but they've sort of cut their own throats to actually sell those off. They already sold off most of the good stuff from their arsenals, leaving themselves with crap they couldn't get running to load onto trains and planes.

The kleptocrats took a nation with vast resources, and threw EVERYTHING they had in the cupboards for sale. And it looked like those warehouses were going to last forever. By then, they had shut down their own production lines, but they had cash, so they could buy stuff from the West to cobble together tech, and feel like they were doing stuff. But they haven't really invested in the country much, they certainly haven't invested in their people, and not too many folks are investing in Russian businesses, because they can't really be trusted to deliver. The skim is just too open, and greedy, but it's what they got. And they did it to themselves. And now, having sucked about the last of the cash that they can suck from their own people, they've GOT to find new warehouses to raid, new people to rob, new lands to strip bare. Because they threw out their education standards a while back, and are just now realizing that if a tiny percentage of your people can do the important technical work, it sort of cuts into your market share.

Ukraine is a vast warehouse to loot. It's got an educated populace that they figure they can exploit, a bunch of workers that they can get for cheap closer to Europe, so that they don't have to invest in building anything new, and it can feed a lot of people, and they've got a lot of people who need feeding back home. Ukraine was an integral part of the USSR, even though they treated her like sh*t, because they didn't want them getting ideas. And oddly enough, people have memories of that sh*t.

Ukraine KNOWS, intimately, what awaits them as a vassal state. They won't see anything looking like representation in the government, they will have everything of value that isn't nailed down sent back to Russia, their schools and future industry will be stripped and degraded to a point where soon enough, they'll be as sh*tty as Russia is today.

The soldiers are just starting the party off early, because they're the tip of the spear. But if the oligarchs get their ham fists into the country much further, they're going to loot it down to the floorboards. Art, industry, agriculture, natural resources, people. It's all got to feed the monster back home, because they don't have a lot left to loot, and they've sort of lost the ability to do much more than maintain. The industry that they have isn't innovating, it's pretty much copying whoever they can steal from. It's a dysfunctional society that could have chosen to join the international community, and instead just drowned themselves in all the toys and luxuries that they could find  in grasshopper fashion. Now they NEED to try to swarm elsewhere like the locusts that they've turned into.