> Ukraine is fighting now for less militarized and endangered Europe.
I hope somebody else can appreciate the irony of this sentence like I do, given that the cause of the conflict is military NATO expansion towards east.
You seem to fail to see, that the so-called "NATO expansion towards East" is independent, democratic countries, voluntarily joining a defence-alliance.
To large parts of Eastern/Northern Europe, it is either be part of a pretty good (but admittedly imperfect) NATO defence alliance - or have your sovereignty threatened by Russia.
You seriously think the Baltic states would be independent today, if they had not gained NATO membership?
From the Russian point of view that's your mortal enemy that has expanded for the past 20 year and now it's knocking on your borders. How would the US react were Canada, an "independent, democratic country", "voluntarily joining a defence-alliance" with Russia that allowed Russian military to place missiles right on the US border?
It will be a cold war situation. If one side brings nukes to the border, the other side will do so as well. A possible deal would be something like NATO and Russia removes their nukes from border countries. And maybe make another deal to remove the amount of nuclear warheads.
Putin wouldn't have allowed them to become members. And this is effectively what is happening here: Putin is unfortunately destroying Ukraine, and effectively making sure that any possibility of joining NATO is long gone. This would have just happened earlier if Ukraine had tried to join NATO.
Nah, he is just ensuring Ukraine gets support to join immediately, and inflicting enormous damage on Russia in the process. He'll be remembered as "The Man Who Ended Russia in a Week". Russians are going to be embarrassed about their nationality for the next 100 years at least.
There is no chance Ukraine will join NATO in the short term (and possibly ever), let alone immediately. This would trigger an Article 5 invocation that would compel NATO members to send troops to Ukraine, escalate the conflict even more, possibly leading to a global war, which no one wants to do.
Yes, but this point is kind of moot given that it was NATO membership expansion in the first place to start the tensions.
You can look up articles from 2008 and see that even Germany (Angela Merkel) was adamantly opposed to Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO, because there was no credible threat from Russia and she knew this would create instability in Europe. The fact that there was no credible Russian threat is easily confirmed if you do a Google search for "ukraine russia" before 2008: you hardly find anything noteworthy. The whole narrative only changed around 2014.
Now we're at the situation where the Ukrainian people, and also Russians and the entire Europe (at least economically), are paying huge costs because we couldn't avoid seconding foolish US foreign policy choices.
Ukraine wasn't in immediate danger because there used to be pro-Russian government. But the citizens of Ukraine want democracy, freedom, don't want corruption and want to be included in the Western sphere, and as a sovereign state, this is up to Ukrainian citizens only.
All this bullshit about "NATO expansion eastward" that "Putin warned against" - LOL, this is no "NATO expansion", this is "free sovereign states joining NATO by their own volition to get protection from aggressors", and Putin's opinion doesn't matter at all and his "warnings" only reveal him as the bully aggressor he is.
His place is to sit home and accept what Ukraine's elections decide. He should've thought out his actions and shouldn't have done things that made Ukrainians want to join NATO and EU if he is afraid (more like paranoid) of NATO being too close.
> You can look up articles from 2008 and see that even Germany (Angela Merkel) was adamantly opposed to Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO, because there was no credible threat from Russia
This shortsightness is exactly what got us into this mess. It was crystal clear in 2008 that this is what Russia will do if the pro-Russian government withers away, but business was more important to Germany.
> The whole narrative only changed around 2014.
No, you're very out of touch. Ukrainians wanted freedom, democracy and end of corruption since forever - but they were silenced by the old government.
Trying not to upset an authoritarian to ease tension will only work in the short term. I'm sure Putin felt threatened for many reasons, both internal and external to Russia. Both valid and imaginary.
It seems that many in Europe hoped to turn a blind eye in return for economic success. I hope much can be recovered and ties restored, but probably not while Putin is at the helm.
> Ukraine didn't have ambitions to join NATO before Putin attacked it for the first time in 2014
That's just not true.
> NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.
This is from the 2008 Bucharest NATO meeting official declaration. [1]
Rather than a justification, I take it as an explanation of why Putin is doing what he's doing, as opposed to the other, often circulated, explanation that he just went crazy and invaded Ukraine for no reason.
I find it way more plausible that he just believes that Ukraine is a birthplace of Russia of mythical and religious significance and Ukrainians are not a separate nation.
It explains way better why he decided wage war that will be devastating to Rusian economy that wasn't doing so well already.
This and access to Ukraine resources because resources is what Russia earns their money from.
That's why he believes sanctions won't be such a big deal in the long run. He thinks Ukraine resources will balance out costs of war.
Talking about NATO agression on Russia is pure and simple propaganda. NATO is a defensive alliance and there's no way USA or anyone could convince other members to invade Russia in peace time.
I hope somebody else can appreciate the irony of this sentence like I do, given that the cause of the conflict is military NATO expansion towards east.