Comment by dragonwriter
Comment by dragonwriter 3 days ago
> It's not about immediate intentions, but about strategic options. Imagine Russia decided to form a military alliance with Mexico with the expected intention of deploying weapons on the Mexican border.
The problem with pretending this analogy is relevant as a justification (or at least an "other people would have one the same thing" argument, which isn't really a justification to start with) of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (besides the fact that it relies on dubious assumptions about a counterfactual) is that the only reason Ukraine resumed its long-abandoned pursuit of relations with NATO was a direct result of the invasion by Russia in 2014.
Ukraine had been striving repeatedly to join NATO until 2010. That's when Yanukovych, who generally leaned more East than West, took power. Ukraine dropped its NATO ambitions under his leadership and re-affirmed themselves as a neutral state. Then he was overthrown, in an action directly backed by the US with John McCain, Victoria Nuland, and others literally on the ground in Ukraine giving speeches and riling up protesters come rioters, almost certainly with further black ops organizing going on behind the scenes.
Following Yanukovych's successful overthrow figures favorable to the US/UN/EU, including those hand picked by Victoria Nuland in her leaked conversation, ended up in power. In fact the person Nuland hand picked for Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, was one of the authors of Ukraine's initial formal request for a membership action plan from NATO.
Can you tell me that you genuinely think that if Russia hadn't annexed Crimea (which happened after all of the above) that Ukraine would have chosen to stay "neutral" in this context? And I put neutral in quotes because what does that even mean when one bloc is driving the successful overthrow of democratically elected leaders and hand picking new ones? Imagine Lavrov et al were on the ground encouraging pro Russian protesters to topple the Ukrainian government (alongside comparably likely black ops organizing behind the scenes), they ended up successful, and then leaders hand-picked by him end up in power. Is that somehow still just Ukraine deciding their own fate?
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93NATO_relations