Agreed entirely. "Conflict with" implies equivalent circumstances between Russia and Ukraine, which is an inappropriate implication for an unprovoked war of aggression.
I completely disagree. Conflict in this case is simply a fancier word for war, it doesn't suggest any of what you're saying.
The only case in which it wouldn't be a conflict in my opinion is if Ukraine had absolutely no intentions or resources to fight back. (In which case it couldn't be called a war either.)
The phrase is one sprung of the zeitgeist of euphemistic war-words conceived in the communion of cable news and State Department press briefings.
This trend of imprecision has been nurtured by the moral cognitive dissonance that was inherent to American reporting on our two recent Eurasian wars.
At pains to make a distinction between classical nation-state war and our adventurism, we merely achieved a degradation in the shared meaning of “war,” “invasion,” etc.
This is very much the crux of the vulnerability Russian innovation in information war seeks to exploit.
"Intervention" is maybe older than you think [0] - definitely older than America's post-war empire. I do not know what is and is not a "western propaganda kitchen," but "intervention" is likely not from one.
Granted: American has used it for basically every war since 1945, most connotation now stems from this.
I caution you - without in any way trying to argue about ideology or civilizations or historical justice! - that American political discourse is not autocratic or controlled, not even secretly. The New York Times and the CIA are both independent actors, and each is itself not a perfect information autocracy.
No oligarch has the power to exile you, and no government the power to imprison you - even informal censorship is impossible. There's no central node able censor all others in order speak without contradiction. There are not literal state propagandists, or at least not many and none effective.
Any analysis of American propaganda, or indeed of America holistically, is flawed if it refuses to accept this reality. Any analysis which seeks to expose lies must start by not lying to itself.
Chomsky writes that free speech as such does not stop Americans from lying effectively and with minimized dissonance to both ourselves and the world. I don't dispute him (couldn't competently in any case).
But there's never been an American Pravda. Blue jeans broke the USSR all on their own: the CIA doesn't know how actually to make something cool. America doesn't possess a fantastical ability to will rock 'n' roll, or color revolutions, into existence.
In this instance, to be a bit more objective about the situation, the choice of 'conflict' is reasonable.
For news headlines, 'Russian Invasion' is more appropriate, because it does communicate what is happening more appropriately.
FYI Russian government is censoring everything everywhere so as to not allow the words 'invasion', 'incursion' or 'war' (!?!?) to be used to describe the situation.
I mean, seriously ... it's not a 'war' ...
It's like Russia is borrowing from it's Soviet era days. When I was a kid that was comedy gold ...
