You bozos still using this dumb talking point? Ukraine was not eligible to join NATO when the war started due to the occupation of the Donbass and Crimea. NATO membership was also hard-stopped by French and German opposition.
The NATO expansion bollocks is a red herring. We’ve heard that directly from Putin’s Brain, Alexander Dugin.
“Without Ukraine Russia cannot become once more the empire. With Ukraine inside of Russian zone of control it will become the empire once more. That is a kind of law, nothing personal. This war or special military operation in in Ukraine is about that. It is about geopolitics.”
This is, was, and will always be, about Russia being the only country on the planet that wants to turn the geopolitical clock back decades without offering a single positive sell.
Putin doesn’t care about the 90% of Russia that’s rusted up with impassable roads, he doesn’t care about the industrial collapse or the intellectual exodus. He doesn’t care about the economy. He doesn’t care about the hundreds of thousands of his citizens who’ve been dragged into his unnecessary meat grinder.
All he cares about is his ridiculous Duginist fantasy and his admiration of Stalin. He simply wants to go to the grave being the man who single handedly brought back the Victorian map by putting jackboots into free countries.
He knows that sane people wouldn’t ever support this ambition if he just came out and said it, but there are enough useful idiots out there who can be convinced to support that endgame simply because Putin sings the right tunes on far less important talking points like WEF, Globohomo, LGBTQ, and NATO expansion.
NATO expansion frustrated the empire ambition. And rightly so. EU expansion frustrated it. And rightly so.
But we kept being told, don’t poke the bear; Putin’s got legitimate beef. Which was bollocks. His only real beef was, his empire restoration project was being cockblocked.
Putin never deserved the kid glove treatment. The minute he started pitching empire restoration he should’ve been taken out to the woodshed and horse whipped round the mouth until he learned a lesson.
Russia doesn’t have the right to be treated as a superpower because it hasn’t advanced anything in decades, and it has totally squandered the opportunities of the collapse of the USSR. China advanced. Russia retarded.
Putin doesn’t deserve an empire because he regards Stalin’s leadership of the USSR as a good role model. It wasn’t even good for Russia. The guy was worse than Hitler.
Irrational ideological crusades are the enemy of us all. Islamofascism and Russofascism are equally bad.