I mean the real question here is why all the central European states wanted to join NATO. Given how peace loving the Russians have been, it seems to be a mystery.

And let's be clear, the Russian Ukraine war started in 2014, not in 2022. I personally would be looking for allies if another country had already invaded part of my territory.

> What makes you certain that this was going to prevent the invasion?

It's not certain but assuming the worst is just an extension of the same moral pure-good and pure-evil that this thread is about. My point is that if your view of the world is that Russia is an pure-evil actor that will keep invading more and more countries no matter what the west does then it'll eventually lead to nuclear war. In which case none of this discussion matters. The reason Finland (or any country) is joining NATO is because it makes that point explicit.

> It's not certain but assuming the worst is just an extension of the same moral pure-good and pure-evil that this thread is about.

One doesn't need to delve morality to figure this out: empirical evidence alone is sufficient to come to the same conclusion. Russia's initial invasion of Ukraine was in 2014, and it still wants more than the Donbas.

Assuming the best goes against existing evidence. Russia has not explicitly said what the limits to its aggression are. Without invoking morality, why would you assume Ukraine is the limit?

If we don't want to believe anything they say then why bother having any diplomatic ties at all? Do you think we'd be in the same or better place if we just cut all communication with Russia?

You only know what they tell you and what your intelligence agencies can uncover. Russia said Ukraine joining NATO was a red line in diplomatic discourse and then they acted on it. Same way the USA told China that aiding Russia in this war would be a red line and China has refrained from providing direct aid even after what happened in Taiwan recently. I don't have any access to classified information so no idea what information is in there but hopefully it's a lot more accurate then what we can read on twitter and Reddit.

> Russia said Ukraine joining NATO was a red line in diplomatic discourse and then they acted on it.

They acted on what exactly, considering that - as far as I know - Ukraine is not a NATO member?

I don't understand why you're still pursuing this argument when Kremlin has dropped the NATO pretext quite a long time ago. According to Putin[1], now it's a special operation to liberate Donbas from their Ukro-Nazi overlords. The Russian PR machine has recently been struggling to find better justifications to this pointless carbon copy of a 19th century colonial war.

As a result of this war, Finland and Sweden joined NATO, turning the Baltic Sea into NATO's internal waters, which isolates Kaliningrad and St Petersburg. Ukraine will sooner or later join it too. The whole western border from Sochi to Murmansk (except puppet state Belarus) will soon be in a mutual defence pact against further Russian aggression. So in this dimension, it's been a spectacular failure for Russia.

The argument of protecting Russians in Ukraine has become morbid at best, after Russia razed to the ground several major cities with large Russian populations, many of whom now lie in nameless mass graves. Daily missile attacks on civilians in eastern Ukraine, where disproportional number of Russians live, doesn't help the case either. After the spectacular counteroffensive, which expelled Russians from Kharkiv region, they have nothing left but threats of widening the war against civilians in pursuit of scorched-earth policy.

So what justifications of this war remain? What halftones are there to discuss? That maybe there still remain some undiscovered arguments in support of blowing up hospitals and power stations?

[1] https://twitter.com/DAlperovitch/status/1570808500053475331

Why do you believe the diplomatic situation is the same pre war as post war?

> Russia gave a number of pretexts for the invasion

Why would you pay attention to these, except as an exercise in PR strategy analysis?

Because the only reason people would even consider that the invasion would have been avoidable if only Ukraine had ruled out joining NATO is because Russia launched a PR campaign in advance of the invasion insisting that all it wanted was for Ukraine not to join NATO (its most effective PR strategy of the whole war)

In which case it's also worth taking into account that Russia was very loudly coming up with a bunch of other rationales for why it needed to go to war for domestic consumption, none of which would have gone away if Ukraine had ruled out joining NATO, making it even less likely that all Putin cared about was the remote possibility that it might join NATO at some unspecified time in future