So the Ukraine war. When something as big as this happens there are many strands of behind the scenes schemes. And schemes that aren't really that behind the scenes just not allowed to be discussed in the MSM. So what I'm about to suggest is in no way meant to be some sole over-arching single driver of events. The MIC want to make their profits, the US Neocons want to cling to their model of a uni-polar world. And there's really just the organic nature of how things play out as oligarchs put their puppets in power, US intelligence funds ultra-nationalists as a bulwark against closer Russian relations and they then end up wagging the dog. It's a giant and horrible mess and we can point at a lot of factors that are conspiracies, in so far as nobody admits to them being the actual reasons, though a lot of the times it's frankly barely below the surface. Anyone who thinks the West is involved in this to protect human freedom can have a lollipop and sit in the corner while the grown-ups talk.
BUT, I want to add one more which I don't hear a lot about and which I do think is quite plausibly a larger driver than you might think. It also accounts for one of the schisms on resolving this between EU and UK leaders, and the USA. Despite that the EU has a lot more to lose through pushing for conflict.
People will recall instances of the EU driving domestic farmers out of their livelihood. Usually under the guise of new Climate Change policies on fertilisers and other environmental standards (none of which seem to be a concern when you're buying in food from non-European countries, btw). And in the UK there have been attempts via inheritance law to essentially break family farms generationally. There's a concerted effort to reduce farm productivity in Western Europe. Which seems insane, no?
Well people quite often talk about Ukraine's mineral wealth, rare earths, etc. But they don't often talk about just how much food is produced in the Ukraine (1). It's a lot. Well, it was. And can be again. You could even call it "the bread basket of Europe" if you wanted and you wouldn't be wholly off the mark.
One of the most powerful ways you can control a population is by having a monopoly on its food. And I mean control of a population in both the numerical sense and the sense of making them do what you want, though primarily the latter. If you have domestic food production, especially if it is sufficient to your needs, it can be quite difficult to do this. You have to make sure the food producers don't feel solidarity with the rest of the population and try to give them the food. You have to stop hungry people marching up the road to the farms and the warehouses and seizing them. You have to insert yourself in between the food producers and the food distributors (shops) which is quite hard to do when they're next to each other - too many ways they'll find to work together. And it's even harder to keep the shopkeepers on your side against the population when they're embedded in the population and comprised by the population.
I'm sure you can see where this is going. Most of these difficulties become a lot less of an issue if your food production is in another country and the food is imported through bottlenecks you control. It wont be perfect but an expensive Black Market doesn't really undermine your control that much. Now in the normal run of things a foreign country controlling a vital resource you need is going to leverage that against you. But if you control the foreign country - if your troops are stationed there, if the politicians' security are your people (recurrent rumours these days that Zelensky's bodyguards are now European, not Ukrainian), if the country is massively in debt to you and bound by all sorts of legal and business agreements - basically your vassal.
Now the USA doesn't need this. Though Trump will try to claw something back for America in return for all the money it's blown there in the form of a treaty on natural resources and infrastructure rebuilding. But it's Europe that is currently most hawkish and determined to not let Russia take land and to bind Kiev to the Europe. Yet the war and tension with Russia harms the EU far more than it does the USA. German industry in particular is suffering badly from cutting off Russian energy.
The anti-farming policies that especially the EU (but also the UK) have pursued, in combination with the sheer self-destructive desire to have and hold the Ukraine and its vast farming resources, make me think that there's a plan to make EU populations dependent on external food production that the EU elites control, and thus cut off the ability of those populations of resisting those in power. Hungry people turn on each other out of sheer survival. If you want to take a block of 100,000 people who hate you and turn them against each other, make sure they only have enough food for 80,000 of them. You want to stamp down on upward mobility? Jack food prices up 10 or 20%. When it's external and you control the food-producing country and the transport links, you can do that without ever having a "monopoly". You can do it in a hundred ways overt or otherwise.
Honestly, this theory is plausible because it matches observable facts and as a strategy, it's a very effective one for the elites to deploy. The main counter-argument is that the Elites aren't so evil as to contemplate it.
Right?
(1) As an aside, you'll notice some people say "the Ukraine" and some say "Ukraine". There's a reason for that. The latter view Ukraine as a country and are referring to it solely as such. The former more used to referring to it as a region. Typically older people and Europeans over Americans, though younger Europeans now tend to just say "Ukraine". The country is only around 70 years old. And that's if you don't count it breaking away from the USSR as its start date which would make it even younger. The borders of the country have moved around a lot compared to the region itself, and the latest redrawing put in a lot of what was formerly Russia (and some other countries). So I favour the more traditional "the Ukraine". Frankly, it's the more historical term and the country itself is likely to soon to no longer line up with the region again anyway.