“Pile up weapons...”?
What the hell are you talking about? For over 30 years NATO conducted an immense disarming of itself (in more ways than just weaponry, but certainly including weaponry to deploy for any kind of serious offensive action against Russia). Even 3+ years in to this mess, NATO cannot come up with a totally inadequate force of 40,000 peacekeepers.
How did NATO expect to defend its new borders without weapons?
The lack of respect for Russian concerns is the primary cause of this war. If those in the West really cared about the genocide of the Ukrainians, we would have dealt with Russia’s concern beforehand, instead of telling them to go pound sand.
From Russia’s point of view, they were justified. We wouldn’t have tolerated a military build up outside our borders, but we seem to think that Russia should act better than us on this matter and trust those at their word that the pile-up of weapons didn’t mean anything.
Would you believe their assurances if they were doing this to us?