What you conveniently leave out is that NATO expansion was driven by eastern European nations seeking its protection from a hostile Russia, not by an aggressively expansionist policy by NATO. Also missing from your analysis is that the Europeans had allowed their militaries to atrophy to the point that they were not a credible threat to Russia. It was this weakness on the part of NATO that encouraged Putin to seize Ukraine, a goal that he had independent of any actions from the west.
“What you conveniently leave out is that NATO expansion was driven by eastern European nations seeking its protection from a hostile Russia,...”
By 1991 that was not an issue, and for fully 15 years afterward, the new-minted Russian Federation had their hands FULL with predominantly internal bureaucratic and economic issues of SUCH severity that there was appreciable pressure within the country to abandon the entire effort and go back to the old Soviet system. There was exactly NO time to look outside the RF and threaten anybody.
WHICH IS WHY “...the Europeans had allowed their militaries to atrophy to the point that they were not a credible threat to Russia.”
By the early oughts, however, finally getting on top of their economic issues, and now feeling the sting of ongoing Western rejection despite having jettisoned the old Soviet regime, the Russian Federation had every reason to begin to feel threatened by NATO encroachment into Eastern Europe. And why would they not? Who can blame them? They did everything the West had desired that they do for 70 years, and what did the αΊ„est give them in return?
Jack shit. THAT’S what.
Why? Deep State NeoCons. THAT’S why.
So, no surprise, then, that in the face of talk about bringing Ukraine into NATO, concurrent with ethnic unrest targeting Russian people living as citizens of Ukraine, after Kiev turned away and utterly failed at any meaningful resolution to the civic unrest, and registered interest in being part of NATO, Putin felt that Russia had some moral obligation to intervene in the ethnic issue, and now could hear the clock ticking away the hours until the admission of Ukraine into NATO. Getting absolutely NOTHING productive out of a flaccid Biden Administration, and nothing productive out of the man-child of Kiev, how was Putin to construe the situation as anything other than a call to unilateral action?
So it was, in part, “...this weakness on the part of NATO that encouraged Putin,” but not “to seize Ukraine,” as you mistakenly suppose. Absorbing Ukraine into the Russian Federation wasn’t ever going to happen, no matter what pipe dreams NeoCons promulgated among the pearl clutchers in the West. The ongoing disagreement over Crimea was not a precursor to an RF takeover of the entirety of Ukraine.
The Russian Federation would be HAPPY to live and trade productively alongside a thriving, independent Ukraine. Had Kiev not turned a blind eye to its ethnic Russian citizens in the Donbas, but dealt firmly and meaningfully with that issue, I think Putin would have been fine continuing to haggle about Crimeaas a separate issue.
NOW, of course...? No chance; the price of peace has gone WAY, WAY UP. God only knows what it will take, now, but absolutely we can 100% hang the albatross on the necks of our infernal domestic NeoCon contingent.