richardag said:
BlueSmoke said:
Teslag said:
Quote:
Further, we also know if you have a modicum of historical perspective, that encroaching on Russian states would only provoke what we are seeing now.
Ukraine isn't and wasn't a "Russian state". It is a sovereign nation which Russia themselves recognized as such.
You obviously know nothing about the history between Russia and Ukraine. Ukraine has their sovereignty, but they are also the front door to Russian land going back thousands of years. It's NATO that has been expansionist, not Russia. Again, we were inches from nuclear war when Russia dared put missiles in Cuba. If Russia or China put bases in Mexico the US would intervene immediately. Going back to the early 90's it's known that any overtures of Ukraine in NATO would be a bridge too far for Russia....and we pushed anyway, knowing what it would spark. Again, we could have stopped this war within the first few months and actively threatened Ukraine with a threat of being cut off if they entertained signing the accords. This is a proxy war that we are loving every minute of and have no intentions to try and assuage.
You do not know the history of Russia nor the Ukraine.
Did NATO Promise Not to Enlarge? Gorbachev Says "No"
Quote from the article
- It is abundantly evident that Russian President Vladimir Putin is no fan of NATO. Indeed, he displays a pronouncedalmost obsessiveantipathy toward the Alliance. He claims that NATO took advantage of Russian weakness after the collapse of the Soviet Union to enlarge to its east, in violation of promises allegedly made to Moscow by Western leaders. But no such promises were madea point now confirmed by someone who was definitely in a position to know: Mikhail Gorbachev, then president of the Soviet Union.
You have been lied to and are blindly regurgitating talking points that are false.
Your conflating two different things. This is about the repercussions of these moves. Actions have consequences. Jesus, Biden's own CIA director, William J. Burns, has been warning about the provocative effect of NATO expansion on Russia since 1995!
His direct quote from that time:
Quote:
Hostility to early NATO expansion is almost universally
felt across the domestic political spectrum here (Moscow)
Then a letter he wrote in 2008 in a memo to Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice:
Quote:
Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines
for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and
a half years of conversations with key Russian players . . .
I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as
anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests
Or William Perry, who served as Defense Secretary under President Bill Clinton. In
a 2017 interview:
Quote:
In the last few years, most of the blame can be pointed at
the actions that Putin has taken. But in the early years I
have to say that the United States deserves much of the
blame.
Further:
Our first action that really set us off in a bad direction
was when NATO started to expand, bringing in eastern European
nations, some of them bordering Russia.
Too recent? In 1997 FIFTY prominent foreign policy experts signed an open letter to Clinton, saying, "We believe that the current U.S. led effort to expand NATO … is a policy error of historic proportions" that would "unsettle European stability."
Maybe George Kennen, who was the father of western Cold War containment doctrine matters - who also stated that expansion would trigger cataclysmic repercussions all the way back in 1998