They did stop. There was that long period from 1990 to 2014 where they were withdrawing their military influence.

Russia was not "withdrawing" by choice. Being kicked out of Eastern Europe was the result of USSR's total economic collapse and inability to feed its soldiers, provide electricity and heating to their barracks, or fuel for their vehicles. It got so bad that officers were forcing conscripts into street prostitution to earn money for food. They were not in a position to suppress the native populations anymore, and gladly packed up their stuff and left in exchange for shipments of American chicken legs.

But even those difficulties did not prevent Russia from using the same old blueprint of coming to the "rescue" of "oppressed minority" time and time again, as much as their means allowed. From Crimea and Donbas in 2014, to Georgia in 2008, to Abkhazia and Transnistria and others in the 1990s, to Afghanistan in the 1980s, to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Hungary in 1956, and countless other "missions in support of brotherly nations", the chain of intrusions into other countries remains unbroken.

  There are a lot of reasons why a war might not have happened, but given that a war has actually happened it only makes sense to look why it did. The NATO budget was allowed to shrink because the USSR budget imploded - NATO was still outspending Russia by more than 10:1.

Money is meaningless metric when Russian military relies on the massive stockpiles created many decades ago. In Europe, much of that spending went towards destroying Cold War era stockpiles to cut long-term storage costs. As a result, Germany has less tanks in its entire arsenal than Russia has lost in Ukraine in the past few weeks, and in the few weeks prior to that, and in the few weeks prior to that too. In total, Russia has lost 40 times the entire German tank fleet.

  Yes. If not for encircling Russia, what use is Estonia to the US? Why else put military resources there?

There were no permanent American "military resources" in Estonia, or anywhere else in Eastern Europe, before Russia invaded Ukraine.

  The specific deployment of those missiles isn't really the point; the point is that the US would never tolerate a whisper of something like NATO but directed against the US on the American continent.

The US already tolerates it. China has military installations on Cuba, which is more than there ever was in Eastern Europe. The entire Europe tolerates nuclear missiles aimed at them from Kaliningrad.

  But, that said, NATO leadership are liars. They said they weren't going to expand NATO, then they did. If they say they aren't going to station missiles in their new military allies you'd be a bit gullible to believe that. It is believable if they say missiles won't be stationed until they are sure Russia can't do anything about it.

Nobody has promised that, or has even been in a position to give such promises. Here's Gorbachev calling it directly a myth, and his defense minister saying that he's never heard about it: https://x.com/splendid_pete/status/1650735533826375680

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlargement_of_NATO - or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:History_of_NATO_enlargeme... if you like visuals.

I don't. Put it into words, if you can. If you are trying to argue that European countries cannot freely choose to cooperate with each other, then Russia has reiterated in multiple treaties their respect (at least in words) for sovereign countries to choose their allies. Huffing and puffing about NATO became mainstream in Russia years after Eastern Europe had entered the organization; as Putin began the transition of Russia into full dictatorship in the late 2000s.

* * *

All in all, your position appears to stand on known falsehoods:

1. That someone had promised to Russians that Central and Eastern European countries would be left isolated and not accepted into any international organizations. Not true.

2. That the acceptance of Central and Eastern Europe into international organizations was some kind of Western scheme and not their own passionate initiative against lukewarm reactions from existing members. Again, not true.

3. That the Americans were placing military resources in Europe. Not true. Leaders of those countries really wanted American and other western military presence to bolster their security against such wars like Russia launched against Ukraine, but never got anywhere with it, because even a possibility of such scenario was not taken seriously.

4. That Russians have been mistreated, humiliated, ignored and so forth. Again, not true, refuted by people who were in the center of the events, like Russian foreign minister Kozyrev.

Drop these falsehoods, and your argument crumbles under its own weight.

That is what withdrawing looks like; armies don't tend to pull back because their occupation is going swimmingly. You already mentioned Ramstein, for example - the US have been in Germany for the better part of a century and the German's weren't welcoming them when they walked in. Armies withdraw because it is untenable to remain.

And you can see the Russian's have learned from that with things like the '08 invasion of Georgia. They only occupied portions of the country instead of the whole thing and it sounds like they're maintaining the legal fiction that they are independent.

> There were no permanent American "military resources" in Estonia, or anywhere else in Eastern Europe, before Russia invaded Ukraine.

So? I doubt there was much if anything in the way of permanent military resources in Ukraine and we've seen around half a million Russian causalities so far. That sort of outcome is a much bigger problem for them than whether the resources in Estonia are permanent or temporary.

If you don't want to explore the question of why the US had/has troops in Estonia of all places then don't bring it up. But I suspect that is a question of great interest to the Russian generals because it is hard to come up with alternatives to it being an anti-Russia encirclement.

> China has military installations on Cuba

Not much of a comparison though. Cuba doesn't have land borders with the US so any aggression has to go through the US Navy first, and China isn't in a position to supply Cuba with more materiel because that would also have to go through the US Navy and Cuba is on the wrong side of the America for easy access. Plus the US military budget is still something like 2-3x China's.

It is hard to see how the Cubans, even with the military might of the Chinese behind them, can leverage that position into half a million dead US citizens. What is the battle plan supposed to be to achieve that?

> The entire Europe tolerates nuclear missiles aimed at them from Kaliningrad.

And there is a lesson there - once the missiles are emplaced there isn't much you can do about them. The important thing is to either negotiate them away or not let hostile powers establish themselves.

> Here's Gorbachev calling it directly a myth...

1) I've watched enough politics that I don't believe a 2-minute out-of-context translated clip to be evidence.

2) I doubt Russians have paper commitments for every possible way that the US can get missiles on their border either. You could just as easily be back in 2040 explaining that the nuclear battery in Estonia was never specifically banned by a treaty because [reasons]. If they'd realised they were signing up for 30 years of NATO expansion they would have asked for more guarantees in writing.

> I don't. Put it into words, if you can.

In the 1990s the Russians reached the point where they couldn't maintain their status as an international superpower. The US response has been to spend 30 years encircling them with a hostile military alliance with both the threat and now reality of killing 10s if not 100s of thousands of Russians.

This is what would be termed "aggressive posturing". As an alternative, defensive posturing involves not advancing and not orchestrating meat grinders.

> All in all, your position appears to stand on known falsehoods:

I still don't think you can articulate the argument here. I don't think 1 is true at all - the hope by everyone when the USSR fell was that those countries would be welcomed into international organisations.

2. To sign up with NATO the US has to agree that it is in their interests. But I also agree that the countries involved were signing up enthusiastically. No-one is claiming they were compelled.

3. This seems like an accurate characterisation on first read, but I'm also obviously correct in the argument here. he US has been pouring materiel into Ukraine. It is reasonable to say that the Ukraine war is being fought with NATO weapons.

4. That isn't an accurate characterisation of my position - every country gets humiliated, mistreated and ignored and that isn't a cause of war. The Chinese just came out of the so-called century of humiliation and so far they have been effectively pacifists given how large they are.

I'm going to restate what I'm saying here in short:

Unless the Russian planners are stupid they will have detected the approach of the large, hostile military alliance and are responding to that approach. The US shouldn't have allowed NATO to expand because we'd expect it to provoke something like the Ukraine war and there isn't any upside in exchange for the provocation. These deaths are mostly meaningless and strengthening bystanders like China at the expense of Europe and the US.

Furthermore, our diplomatic position on Ukraine should be "the precedent here is the US invasion of Iraq, we should treat this similarly and work to re-establish the peace. NATO's leadership took a bad situation, made it worse and they should be replaced".

And I can tell that you don't believe NATO is hostile although how you square that with the number of deaths they have caused in Ukraine I don't know. I suspect the Russians don't know how to square that either. NATO is aggressive, violent and hostile. They can't opportunistically organise half a million casualties the way that the US has and pretend to be neutral or friendly - again, we have precedent for how this is expected to play out from all the times the US has launched random invasions of small players over the last few decades.

I'll try to keep it short and structured:

1. Russians were kicked out of Europe because their entire economy collapsed and they became unable to field occupying armies anymore. This is not a proof of "change of government philosophy".

2. Withdrawal suits much better to describe American forces in Europe. They removed hundreds of thousands of soldiers, almost all heavy weaponry, and closed half of all military installations as a policy choice.

3. Russians were back to their old tricks by mid-1990s and that drove Eastern Europe to seek security from NATO.

4. The US has had infantry in Estonia for training purposes. Estonians are specialists in camouflage, small unit tactics and winter warfare, while the Americans have a lot to teach about combined arms warfare. Estonia has hosted many countries, Poland has had air defense systems set up and Swedish air force has flown simulated missions against them. That's what friendly nations do.

5. Foreign deployments have been intentionally limited to insignificant numbers so that Russia could not credibly claim to be threatened, but Russians are nevertheless annoyed. Not because they have a delusion that a few hundred infantrymen can "encircle" a country that spans 11 timezones, but because lauching missiles at Estonian barracks (like Ukraine saw on 24th February 2022) could potentially kill hundreds of Americans and drag the US into the war on day one.

6. If you want to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans in Cuba, then an ill-prepared invasion along the lines of the Bay of Pigs would be great idea. When the invasion fails, keep sending hundreds of thousands of fresh troops into Cuba year after year. Don't forget to blame China if they help Cuba out with ammo.

7. Placement of NATO missiles in Europe was already negotiated in 1997 and NATO has sticked to their commitments. Only Russia has been inching closer to the other side.

8. If Gorbachev directly calling the "NATO promises" a myth is not good enough for you, then here's the foreign minister of the USSR giving a longer interview repeating the same things. According to him, nothing of this sort was discussed with Western diplomats, Warsaw Pact, or within communist party circles in Moscow. As a bonus, he says that he finds nothing wrong with the way Eastern Europe joined NATO: https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/interview-with-e...

9. That everyone "welcomed" Central and Eastern Europe into international organizations. Memoirs of diplomats, politicians and other representatives are littered with stories how no-one even took the countries they represented as actual countries, let alone viewed as even remote candidates to organizations. Early proponents of the EU and NATO membership were openly ridiculed even domestically. Go visit a library, read old newspapers, it's all there.

10. Integration of Central and Eastern Europe into the European Union and NATO has been a phenomenal success and has produced some of the most stable and prosperous countries on the planet. My first salary barely 30 years ago was 27 USD a month. Nowadays, it surpasses the average of several countries in Western Europe. Integration roadmaps helped CEE countries develop into modern states that have separation of powers, respect human rights, are run by law and offer ample opportunities. In alternative timeline, the 100 million people who gained freedom could've ended up in Russian-controlled totalitarian dictatorships like Belarus. That may not have a meaningful impact on your life, but it very much does have on mine.

11. Again, nobody was "pouring weapons into Ukraine" before Russia invaded. And nowadays, military aid to Ukraine - including heavy weaponry - is coming from all continents except Antarctica. If only penguins had a few artillery pieces to spare.

12. You keep repeating how the Americans keep "orchestrating meat grinders". Russians invaded a foreign country and are ready to die by hundreds of thousands instead of leaving Ukrainians alone and going home. It's their choice.

13. You keep blaming Russian deaths on the Americans. This is as stupid as blaming deaths of invaders on people whose home was invaded, and on their neighbors who lent knives and baseball bats to fight them off.

14. NATO is so incredibly hostile that still cannot decide whether it should shoot down armed Russian drones flying over their cities. Happened twice in Romania last week, people got air raid alerts with instructions to seek shelter.

15. Russia is provoked by weakness and attacks countries that lag behind in building relations with other countries and remain fairly isolated, because this lowers the risk for them. Ideally, they would have entire Europe neutral like in the 1940s, so that they could invade them one by one like they did back then. European countries have learned the lessons of the misguided 1930s neutrality and nowadays seek security in numbers and mutual cooperation.

16. Most of your lines of thinking lead back to the central theme that NATO is bad because it causes more Russians to die when they decide to invade Europe. Very revealing. You do not care about the freedom and wellbeing of millions of Europeans, only the lives of invading Russians seem to matter.