Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted

That may be true in the most narrow and mechanical sense, but the way it presents blame is very wrong.

The first rule of kremnology is that Russia always lies without a shame, as lies are usefull and they incur zero cost on the liar.

Russia invaded because they felt Ukraine was showing a bad example of slavic people becoming a democracy.

Also Russia has always had an affinity towards Ukrainian genocide. See Holodomor.

Also there is the narrative of lost colonial honor, Crimea, Catherine the great, and other idiotic pseudo-historical ramblings of a demented autocratic propagnada.

Russia returns Crimea, Donbass etc and Ukraine promises not to join NATO.

Strange that Putin hasn't proposed such a deal.

NATO membership has never had anything to do with it. Note how Finland has joined NATO since 2022, and faces no repercussions from Russia, despite a third of their land-based nuclear missiles within 400 km of the Finnish border.

I wouldn’t argue that EU and the US did not screw up in 20{08,14} though. We did. Massively. We did underestimate Putins long game - had we known how far he wants to go, and I’d argue most post soviet countries knew, this would’ve been nipped in the bud.

They gave up their nukes in exchange for protection from Russia and the US. Both countries have failed to keep up their end of the bargain, so it's sensible for Ukraine to get back what they gave up.

Useful word: Revanchism [0], for people who want to conquer places they claim they once-owned.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/revanchist

One strand of BS I've seen is "Ukraine now is a different country than the one we promised never to invade."

If that's really how it works, Russia should be ejected from the United Nations and apologize for fraudulently casting votes in the UN Security Council, because it's a different country than the USSR.

Was Ukraine candidate for NATO?

Yes, Ukraine has been a candidate for NATO membership. In 2008, during the Bucharest Summit, NATO members agreed that Ukraine would eventually become a member of the alliance. However, no formal invitation was extended at that time. COMMONS LIBRARY

In 2010, under President Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine adopted a non-aligned status, halting its pursuit of NATO membership. This policy shifted after the 2014 annexation of Crimea by Russia, leading Ukraine to renew its aspirations for NATO integration. In 2019, Ukraine amended its constitution to enshrine the goal of joining NATO. NATO

In September 2022, following Russia's annexation of parts of southeastern Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that Ukraine had applied for NATO membership under an accelerated procedure. WIKIPEDIA As of November 2024, Ukraine remains a NATO partner country and has not yet achieved full membership.

Between 2010 and later 2022 (i.e., not in 2014 or in February 2022) Ukraine was officially not pursuing membership, and France, Germany and the US were all unofficially making it clear that NATO membership was not being pursued and would not be offered.

Ukraine applied for NATO membership after Russia's invasion. It cannot therefore be a cause of Russia's invasion. At the time Russia sponsored and supported internal revolt in Crimea and Donbass, it was 2014 and Ukraine was officially and unofficially not in or applying to NATO--so how can that be the cause of Russian intervention then?

Thank you, though, for using ChatGPT to support my contention that NATO membership had nothing to do with Russia's invasion.

BTW, Russia has shared borders with multiple NATO countries, starting with Norway in 1949 when NATO was founded, and the Baltics since 2004. A neighbouring country's membership in an alliance is not a casus belli.

you’re describing international relations, none of this is specific to russia. people are indoctrinated from birth into nationalist propaganda. when these mouthpieces speak they aren’t lying, but it’s not the truth.

And I wouldn't blame them.

The West promised to protect them and failed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_2021_Russian_ultimatu...

Inofficially, of course the U.S. wanted Ukraine in NATO and the EU all the time. Merkel opposed NATO membership at some point, but Germany is just a vassal state.

Although Russia has obstinately described NATO expansion as a threat, Putin was actually more concerned about the loss of Russia’s perceived sphere of influence in former Soviet republics which were aligning themselves with the West economically and politically

So it wasn’t about NATO, it was about maintained a decaying sphere of influence.

Boris Bondarev, a Russian diplomat who later resigned in protest of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, recalled that the draft treaties had shocked many Russian diplomats and that he immediately viewed the demands as non-negotiable.

Even the Russian diplomats knew it was posturing while Russia added to the 100,000 troops already staging on the border with Ukraine. Demands made at the point of 100,000 guns pointed at you are not good faith negotiating positions.

What right does Russia have to formalized neutrality, to control Ukraine’s foreign policy? Do you think that, since “Germany is just a vassal state” that Russia deserves one too?

[ETA: formatting]

Indeed, russia started this war by refusing to be neutral. Thus, Ukraine will perhaps show neutrality if russia shows neutrality first.

https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/who-caused-the-ukraine-wa...

It’s the ”i know they are lying, they know i know, and yet they lie”. One of the points is not to convince but to confuse.

Actually it was Putin's acting and speaking as if he could partially restore the glory of the former Soviet empire (whose collapse he called "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century") that got Russia into its current mess in Ukraine.

He does, in any case, consider the current Russian Federation and the Soviet Union to be continuations of "historic Russia". So it's not Western rhetoric. And it isn't the West that is making him invade Ukraine and menace other countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valdai_Discussion_Club

The war is what caused Ukraine to restart its previously-repudiated attempts to join NATO, so this isn’t just wrong but entirely backwards.

But Mearsheimer's arguments are convincing.

We may find it ridiculous to be afraid of NATO or the USA. Others do not.

Putin's actions do not line up with this portrait of him as a hyper-rational long-term strategist acting on the interests of the Russian state. They line up very well with what you would expect from an aging, deeply conspiratorial cold warrior with widely publicized nationalist beliefs [0], a desire to have a legacy that compares against the likes of Peter the Great [1], and the type of delusional thinking that is the near-inevitable result of not having anyone that is willing (due to brownnosing) or able (due to corruption) to tell you hard truths [2].

Even when someone like Tucker Carlson sits down with Putin and practically tees him up to blame the war on US, he goes on ridiculous historical tangents to try to justify why Ukraine isn't real, as opposed to saying anything related to NATO. And that's not a fluke. Russian internal narratives are vastly more focused on nationalism than on anything resembling "NATO made us do this".

You also just have to look at the assassinations carried out on NATO soil - including using chemical and radiological weapons - blowing up Czech ammunition depots, etc. Years and years of unilateral kinetic escalation directly against the west. And then no response whatsoever when Finland and Sweden joined NATO.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/21/world/europe/putin-ukrain...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/10/putin-compares...

[2] There's far too many instances of this to even count.

The second possibility makes much more sense (and is more informative), so I should have assumed that one instead.

What we do know is that they've been in close contact, and that he is sincerely grateful to them:

   In John Mearsheimer's 2023 book "How States Think", the foreword acknowledges him receiving a small financial support from Valdai in conjunction with Best Book award for his 2019 book "The Great Delusion".

They're not all, and are in fact easily debunked.

One just needs to read between the lines a little bit.

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42197501

We may find it ridiculous to be afraid of NATO or the USA

Russia isn't "afraid" of either -- it just considers them to be annoyances.

Its regime pretends be "afraid" of both, for the benefit of its internal and external propaganda, and of course to entice its people to sign up for the meat grinder. But that's just its delusion, which we are under no obligation to honor or validate.