NATO should really award Putin for being the most effective NATO spokesman of the decade. Finland went from 20% in favour of NATO membership (2019) to 68% in favour of NATO membership (April, 2022).

And he's possibly done more than any other European politician towards shifting Europe off fossil fuels.

We'll see. Some things are easier to say than they are to do.

I think NATOs new popularity is what will ultimately save Macron in the French elections. Le Penn wants to disband NATO and snuggle up with Putin and I doubt if the majority of the French will fall for that.

Raytheon and Lockheed should gift Putin some champagne ;)

Interesting idea. Just keep sending them lavish thank you gifts from foreign politicians, investors, and corporations until the people get suspicious.

Ok, now that's a idea i can stand behind...for example some polarbear-paws-ashtrays from Sudan? From Nord-korea, a stolen Japanese singer?

Pre-invasion, I put the odds of invasion around 30% because one of Putin's gripes was Ukraine flirting with the West and NATO, and while invading would could cement its role as "borderlands," it would also convince Sweden and Finland to join, and quickly.

I also saw it as long-term detrimental to its role as an energy exporter because this would inspire Europe to quickly migrate to more renewables, though this take is more of a western perspective and probably wasn't a priority for Putin.

Pre-invasion my own thoughts would have tended to agree with yours. I think that what caught us off guard was the mistaken assumption that Putin was actually well-informed enough to reach similar conclusions, rather than him sitting in a Potemkin ivory tower while being advised by pusillanimous yes men.

Let's assume Putin is not a NATO puppet or a masochist. Why do you think he attacked Ukraine? What is there to gain?

Russia made concessions to NATO for 30 years and got nothing but NATO expansion Eastward.

I don't see any other explanation except that allowing NATO rockets in Ukraine is suicidal for Russia, therefore there is no choice: it is a fight for survival.

Think what US would do if Russia were to put its rockets in Mexico and/or Canada. Or just remember Cuba/Turkey situation in 60s.

(it is funny how socialism was replaced by capitalism long ago but it didn't affect the cultivated hatred to / dehumanization of Russian people on the West).

You are right. People very much hate Russia.

The atrocities done by Russians in Ukraine might be new to people of the West, but are the same old Russians for us in Eastern Europe, or everywhere else bordering Russia.

Russians aren't really treating Ukraine any differently than they were treating whole Europe but especially Poland in WW2, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and of course Afghanistan. And the fall of Soviet Union didn't change anything - since 1990, Russians managed to fight war in Georgia, Moldova, Chechnya, Dagestan, Chechnya again, Georgia again, Ukraine, Syria, and now Ukraine again in full force. All of these places have felt the Russian touch.

Nobody in the world is doing more to make sure Russians are hated than the Russian soldiers and government themselves.

Thank you for at least not denying of the existence of the multigenerational anti-russian propaganda.

The "propaganda" is just Russia acting like a rabid animal.

> I don't see any other explanation except that allowing NATO rockets in Ukraine is suicidal for Russia, therefore there is no choice: it is a fight for survival.

> Think what US would do if Russia were to put its rockets in Mexico and/or Canada. Or just remember Cuba/Turkey situation in 60s.

If it is just a defense pact and not first strike nukes, I wouldn't care. AFAIK, the US hasn't expanded nuclear weapons eastword since the cuban missile crises so I'm not sure what your point is. Estonia is part of NATO but we don't host nukes there because we don't want to trigger the Cuban missile crises again.

> I don't see any other explanation except that allowing NATO rockets in Ukraine is suicidal for Russia

Are there any nuclear weapons in previous Warsaw pact countries? From everything I can read it seems like there are not.

No one I know "hates" Russia. Most just don't care about it. Russia has some strange national narrative that the West is trying to westernize it. We don't care if Russia is westernized or not. That is up to the Russian people who also seem fine with adopting some western concepts, it's mostly the boomers in the Russian government that demonize it. Instead of governing well they make a "western" strawman and cry over that instead of fixing their country and moving into the 21st century.

There's some weird vibes from Russians online with regards to the West and the US in particular.

Anytime you tell Russians that the US basically just wants out of Europe and to focus on China (Remember the pivot to Asia? This doesn't even paint the US in a good light, just a self interested one), they insist that Russia is the US's greatest enemy and that China is basically just a minor member of the team Russia built to destroy the west.

> allowing NATO rockets in Ukraine is suicidal for Russia, therefore there is no choice: it is a fight for survival

This is the ridiculous Russian twist of facts that makes absolutely no sense. I can't even bother debunking it now. Just as credible as the de-nazification.

It's just Russia losing its sphere of influence and Putin can't take it in his delirious dreams of imagined Russian supremacy. In truth there's no threat except of losing some influence as all Russia's neighbors naturally want to get as far away them as possible.

You can't comprehend Russia with western logic, but you can search for patterns in historical actions under Putin.

Russia wants to keep it's power by force in it's self claimed sphere of influence in old Soviet countries.

That motivation for military intervention for influence is widely documented through the similarities in Russia's last 25 military interventions since 1991 - https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA444-3.html .

Additionally, gas was found in Crimea which would make moving away from Russian gas much easier and they tried to reference the invasion of Ukraine to the decline of the west. Russia ( or better: Putin) obviously still lives in the USSR past, which collapsed without any military action of the west.

The invasion of Ukraine has as much to do with NATO as the invasion of Chechen and Servia had to do with NATO. The only thing NATO caused was they waited longer to actually invade and tried a gray zone invasion first ( without much success), but NATO is not the reason for invasion.

Russia's self claimed sphere of influence is, while they are losing influence constantly, just look at their military interventions in their CSTO allies. Even Orban isn't yelling to loud about preferring Russia over EU countries, although he would want to.

Post soviet countries aren't getting invaded by NATO and annexed by force. They are choosing to move away from Russia and choosing for closer ties with western countries.

Self-defence has nothing to do with Russias invasion. This was not a war for survival but a war for subjugation.

Nobody outside of ex-Soviet Union countrys hated Russians before the war.

If you really want to invoke and analogue from US history then the only example that comes to my mind is the US war of independence and I'm pretty sure on which side of that fight US would like to be.