It gets less clear-cut as the war drags on. For example, a rather extreme law on mass media has been passed in Ukraine recently, with the justification that it is necessary to block Russian propaganda.
I wouldn't be surprised if Ukraine ends up winning a Pyrrhic victory in a sense that it'll liberate all of its territory, but its internal politics will radicalize in the process, if not to the point of becoming outright non-democratic, then at least becoming more like Hungary or Poland: a democratic majority voting in fully support of a crackdown on all political, ideological, and cultural opposition.
Yes, that is true, though similar erosions of democracy also happen in well-established democracies like the US and UK when there are wars. I think there is clearly still an aspiration towards western-style liberal democracy even if there are many gaps in how it's implemented.
I think this aspiration is the fundamental problem for Putin. He sees it as encouraging things like the ousting of Yanukovych, which he desperately wants to stop from being repeated in other countries within his sphere of influence. He already almost lost Belarus in a similar way.
I'm pretty sure that Putin literally believes all that tripe about "triune people", and I don't think he needed any excuses beyond that. Well, there's also the part where I think he really wants to end up in the history textbooks with the same standing as Ivan III and other famous "gatherers of the land".
So, in a sense, he is also fighting for his country and its nation - it just happens to be an imaginary one: "Greater Russia".
https://kyivindependent.com/news-feed/zelensky-signs-media-l...
I wouldn't be surprised if Ukraine ends up winning a Pyrrhic victory in a sense that it'll liberate all of its territory, but its internal politics will radicalize in the process, if not to the point of becoming outright non-democratic, then at least becoming more like Hungary or Poland: a democratic majority voting in fully support of a crackdown on all political, ideological, and cultural opposition.