this is one reason I am staying neutral on this one. Because it's a lot more complex than "Russia invades the Ukraine". First off, there are neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine. Second, they were harassing and attacking Russian speaking groups in the two parts of Ukraine that Putin was supposedly originally going after. Third, the legally elected leader of Ukraine was overthrown a few years ago and replaced with the current guy. Fourth, there were treaties signed with Russia re. former satellite states not joining NATO - a few of these have already been violated, but now Ukraine was talking about joining, which is against the terms of the treaty. So this tweaked Putin's tail. The problem with that is Putin has nuclear weapons.

None of this justifies Putin invading Ukraine, BTW, but it helps to understand the context.

Instead of going to war and risking a nuclear war, we should try to find a diplomatic solution. It was sorta like in WWII - the Japanese would have negotiated a peace IF we had recognized their Emperor. We didn't, instead we bombed civilians in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It was horrible that those people were killed when we could have had a diplomatic solution that would have saved lives.

As far as the racism... it's there. It's awful. It's unfortunately not unique to Ukraine. Many Asian countries and also those in South America are racist towards darker skinned people and many Muslim countries treat women very badly. You'd think we would have evolved beyond this by now...