You mentioned wanting to avoid moral insinuations and focus purely on the direct actors, but both of the analogies you used (police vs. robbers, bullied kid vs. bully) inherently rely on moral framing. They cast one side as a legitimate authority or innocent victim, and the other as the undisputed aggressor.

If the goal is truly to look at this without moral bias and just examine the causal chain of events, those analogies don't work. There is no geopolitical equivalent of your examples without bias. It's two competing states engaged in an escalating conflict. When you use analogies that bake in a "good guy/bad guy" dynamic, it introduces the exact moral framing you stated you were trying to avoid.