If you wanted to honestly discuss the Russia-Ukraine war and our participation in it, it would be necessary to point out how the primary enablers of the Russian oligarchs are American oligarchs on Wall Street.
That American real estate continues to be the preferred way for Russian oligarchs to launder dirty money, and neither the Biden Administration nor the GOP has any intention of doing anything about that.
That NATO is using a slush fund to keep Ukraine in the war, and that Interpol says most of the weapons that we've given Ukraine will wind up in the hand of criminals and terrorists.

And then there's the people that identify on the Left that honestly think that Ukraine is defending democracy. The Communist Party of Ukraine got over 2.6 million votes and 32 seats in parliament as late as 2012. In May of 2015, Ukraine banned all communist parties and all communist symbols.
The leader of the Communist Party of Ukraine was physically attacked while addressing parliament by members of All-Ukrainian Union "Svoboda", the neo-Nazi party, in 2014. A few months later this same right-wing mob tried to violently overrun parliament.
If you are a good liberal this won't bother you because it's just communists, right? No one hates communists more than liberals and they will gladly sell out communists to the right-wing every chance they get. But if you know anything about history then you would know that the right-wing never stops with just communists.

Ukraine’s Western-backed government has used Russia’s February 24 invasion to drastically escalate its repression of the left, banning Ukrainian socialist parties and imprisoning left-wing activists. There are widespread reports of Ukrainian state security services arresting and torturing leftists.
In an early morning speech on March 20, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council was banning 11 opposition political parties, half of which are left-wing.

One of the parties that were banned was Opposition Platform – For Life, which had 43 members currently serving in parliament, and was the 3rd largest political party in Ukraine.
The leader of this recently banned party was then thrown into jail when he tried to flee the country.
While President Zelenskiy was effectively banning all left-wing opposition parties, he was also cracking down on any leftist media outlets.
But that debate is for another day.

Instead I want to focus specifically on Crimea.

First off, let's look at the historical context.

For Ukrainians, the struggle to end the Russian occupation of Crimea is not just a matter of sovereignty, human rights, or national security. It is also a quest to defend international law and restore historical justice.
...
The Russian Empire does not actually feature in the approximately three millennia of recorded Crimean history until relatively recently, appearing towards the end of the eighteenth century. For thousands of years prior to Russia’s arrival on the scene, Crimea was home to a cosmopolitan array of peoples and nations including the Greeks, Scythians, Romans, Goths, Byzantines, and many others. Far from being ancestral Russian land, the peninsula has traditionally been an international crossroads of cultures and civilizations.

The epoch of the Crimean Khanate occupies a particularly prominent place in Crimean history. This period saw the evolution of the Crimean Tatar identity. The Crimean Tatars have not had a state of their own for almost 250 years, but are now recognized as an indigenous people of Ukraine as a result of legislation adopted by the Ukrainian parliament in July 2021.
...
Crimea has always loomed large in Ukraine’s national story. The celebrated tenth century Ukrainian prince, Volodymyr the Great, who is credited with converting the medieval Kyivan Rus state to Christianity, was himself baptized in Crimea.

All of what the Atlantic Council says here is true. The problem is everything they DON'T say.
What they fail to point out is:
1) Crimean Tartars are NOT historically Ukrainian. The Tartars were from the Asian steppes, and conquered Crimea and the Kyivan Rus in a near-genocidal invasion in the 13th Century. In fact, the Crimean Tatars spent centuries making brutal slave raids into the lands of what is now Ukraine, until 75% of the population of Crimea in 1769 were slaves or former slaves.
2a) Volodymyr the Great was originally from Novgorod, which is where the roots of the current state of Russia began, and 2b) Russia also traces its roots in the Kyivan Rus, 2c) the Kyivan Rus lost control of Crimea not long after.
3) Crimea existed historically under the control of Greeks, Romans, Byzantium, Persian empires, etc. for centuries. Not once during those centuries did those empires ever control the land that is considered Ukraine today.
4) the Ukrainian identity doesn't actually have a beginning until the rise of the Cossacks in the mid-16th Century.

Crimea fell under the control of Russia in 1783 and remained that way until the Soviet Union redefined it as part of Ukraine in 1954. In other words, Crimea has been part of Russia longer than Florida has been part of the U.S.
Despite all of these facts, the pro-war West is trying to portray Ukrainian ambition of taking Crimea from Russia as some sort of righting a historical wrong.

VOA: US: ‘Crimea Remains Part of Ukraine,’ Retaking Russian-Held Areas Top Concern

“The United States does not and never will recognize Russia’s purported annexation of the peninsula. Crimea is Ukraine,” the State Department said in a statement.

The idea of Putin simply accepting the loss of Crimea to a hostile neighboring state is absurd. The famous Black Sea fleet has been based there for centuries. To think that the Russian military will simply accept losing control of that strategic naval base is as ridiculous of an idea as thinking the U.S. military was going to accept losing control of the strategic Panama Canal naval base to Noriega in 1989.
The Kremlin would simply kick Putin out of power if he ever agreed to this, and replace him with a hard-liner more ready to use nuclear weapons.

More importantly, there's the opinions of the people of Crimea to consider.
NBC recently made the mistake of actually asking people there what they think.

“This is our land,” she said Monday. “We will all put on uniforms and will go to the border to defend ourselves.”Her comments echoed those of most people NBC News spoke to in Crimea this week. While the government of President Vladimir Putin has cracked down on free speech everywhere, including in Crimea, the peninsula’s majority Russian-speaking population was considered more pro-Moscow than in other parts of Ukraine when it was annexed.

There has also been numerous referendums in Crimea over many decades.
A lot of the Putin/Russia haters like to say that the 2014 referendum, where 96% of the voters in Crimea wanted to join with Russia, was rigged, done at the point of a Russian bayonet, etc.

Now I could debate you on that, but I'm not going to bother, because I don't have to. Instead I'm going to refer to the 1991 Crimean sovereignty referendum.
Voters were asked whether they wanted to re-establish the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, which had been abolished in 1945. The proposal was approved by 94% of voters.

In other words, Crimea voted overwhelmingly to separate from Ukraine (with an 81% turnout). What's more, everything was moving in that direction. Even Ukraine agreed.
However, check out how the Washington Post spun this vote years later.

Crimea had a referendum on independence from Russia back in 1991, when it was far more Russian than today, and it then favored being part of a newly independent Ukraine.

That is simply a lie. A blatant falsehood. Even Wikipedia is more accurate and truthful.

This would have meant that Crimea would have been a sovereign subject of the renewed USSR and separate from the Ukrainian SSR.

Following the referendum, the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR passed the law "On Restoration of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialistic Republic as part of USSR" on 12 February 1991, restoring Crimea's autonomous status as independent from the Ukrainian SSR.
But Crimea's separation from Ukraine got hung up on a technicality.
However, the issue didn't go away.

May 5, 1992: Crimea's parliament declares total independence subject to approval in a referendum to be held in August 1992.

May 13, 1992: The Ukrainian parliament declares the Crimean parliament's independence declaration unconstitutional and gives them until May 20 to rescind it. They also give President Kravchuk the power to use all necessary means to halt Crimean independence.

The Ukraine government required Crimean Russians to set their clocks to the same time as the rest of Ukraine for the first time since 1994, when the Russians had switched to Moscow time in protest. The Ukraine government had initially tolerated a second time zone within Ukraine, but required the Crimeans to come into line after four years. (The Independent [London] 3/28/97)

Which brings up the 1994 Crimean referendum, where 78% of the voters wanted autonomy from Ukraine.
Even more enlightening in that same referendum, is that 83% of Crimean voters wanted to have dual passports with Russia. The LA Times reported it at the time this way: Separatists Win Big in Crimea Vote : Ukraine: Candidates who favor independence or rejoining Russia get 73% of presidential ballots
This time Ukraine's government simply called the election illegal and ignored the results.

Did Putin rig the opinion polls too? I'm not talking about some Russian company under Putin's thumb. I'm talking about opinion polls conducted by American companies.

In June 2014, a Gallup poll with the Broadcasting Board of Governors asked Crimeans if the results in the March 16, 2014 referendum to secede reflected the views of the people. A total of 82.8% of Crimeans said yes. When broken down by ethnicity, 93.6% of ethnic Russians said they believed the vote to secede was legitimate, while 68.4% of Ukrainians felt so. Moreover, when asked if joining Russia will ultimately make life better for them and their family, 73.9% said yes while 5.5% said no.

In February 2015, a poll by German polling firm GfK revealed that attitudes have not changed. When asked “Do you endorse Russia’s annexation of Crimea?”, a total of 82% of the respondents answered “yes, definitely,” and another 11% answered “yes, for the most part.” Only 2% said they didn't know, and another 2% said no. Three percent did not specify their position.

How many times to the people of Crimea have to say it before the West will listen? Crimea wants to be part of Russia.