Ukraine, with the resources and military they had, wanted war with a nuclear power with a much larger military?

Not only did they then, they still want to now. Are you not following this war? Several rounds of peace talks have been spurned by Ukraine now. When we say "they" of course we mean the fascist dictatorship that's running the place, not all the people.

Was anyone in Ukraine even talking about war in 2014

Of course? More specifically they wanted to "lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen" and so forth, according to Andriy Biletzky for example. This is the type of guy who got put in power after the Nazi coup.

when Russia invaded Crimea and started that shit in the east?

I'm afraid you've been taken for a fool here. That's not what happened. Independent Crimea invited Russia in to protect its citizens from the Nazi pogroms that had already started directly after the coup. Here you can read the people who live there's polling. Around 15% considered themselves to be Ukrainian. Over 50% wanted a union with Russia compared with 17% with Ukraine.

Later a Pew research poll from 2014 found that 91% of Crimeans considered the referendum free and fair, and 88% felt Kyiv should accept the results.

Something doesn’t fit here.

Indeed. You should be annoyed at the people who lied to you.

Russia invaded Ukraine. Not the US, not NATO, not the EU, not China, not the bogeyman: it was Russia.

The USA overthrew Ukraine's democracy and popularised a Nazi based ultranationalism. Not Russia or anyone else.

You should stop painting Russia as if they are a bunch of amateurs that can’t control themselves. They weren’t baited or provoked. They looked at the political situation in Ukraine and made the decision to invade, twice. Putin isn’t a moron, so presenting him as being played by the US or having no other choices makes no sense.

This again is just a product of propagandising and manipulation. I understand it's hard to accept the scale of the lies, I really do. But accept it you must if you want to consider yourself to be a rational well informed person.

What would it take for me to convince you? A confession from the head of NATO or something?

Well you're in luck. Stoltenberg confessed a couple of days ago.

During a speech at the EU Parliament’s foreign affairs committee on Thursday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg clearly and repeatedly acknowledged that Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine because of fears of NATO expansionism.

The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.

The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.

So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.

In reality Stoltenberg is just stating a well established fact: contrary to the official western narrative, Putin invaded Ukraine not because he is evil and hates freedom but because no great power ever allows foreign military threats to amass on its borders  —  including the United States. That’s why so many western analysts and officials spent years warning that NATO’s actions were going to provoke a war, and yet when war broke out we were slammed with a tsunami of mass media propaganda repeating over and over and over again that this was an “unprovoked invasion”.

What’s happening is the consequence of a country invading another in order to expand their borders. Anyone (and I mean anyone) doing that should pay a heavy price so they learn the lesson.

What's happening is that the US has gotten its latest war that it's been pushing for for decades. It's always the USA, always has been, except this time, right?