Posted on 08/13/2026 10:24:42 AM PDT by adorno
Kazakhstan's president might be inviting Putin to shove him off an open window
On 8/14/2026, 5:38:32 PM you replied:
“NOpe!"
What is it that you’re saying “NOpe!” to?
No one disputes the mob was violent, and killed police.
No one disputes the mob took over government buildings in their bid to overthrow the elected president of Ukraine.
So what exactly are you saying “NOpe!” to in response?
Still not AI slop. I’ve been working with Russians and Ukrainians, in a multinational context, for over fifteen years. Unlike you, I don’t have to rely on AI or biased second-hand reporting from the St Petersburg bullshit factory.
I was actually reading the monthly reports from the DNR ombudsman in Donetsk, operating from the FSB building there, for over two years before Putin finally blocked their English language website on the basis that the entire world was literally able to read his own intelligence agency resoundingly contradicting his false narrative, every single month, between Jan 2019 and Feb 2022. Even HIS OWN AGENCY confirmed there was no “genocide” of “Russian speakers” going on:
- civilian casualties in most months were not even statistically significant. If an area the size of Massachusetts and New Jersey combined had been at war, you’d expect to see at least a three-digit body count, but it wasn’t even hitting double digits. In reality, more civilians died in a single car crash in one month than died that month due to hostile action by either Russian thugs or ukronazis.
- in their own Jan 2022 monthly report, the DNR confirmed the total number of deaths in the whole of the Donbas region, from conflict, for the whole month, was six. All combatants.
So how about you apply some real “critical thinking” instead of just accepting without question, Kremlin narratives that don’t stand up once they’re subjected to some critical thinking.
“NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO...”
Irrelevant. Nothing more than warm words. Diplomatic flattery.
Any aspiration to join NATO, or even an invitation to join NATO, has to be followed up with an application to turn into anything more than diplomatic flattery. And Putin knows that, because even he’s complained repeatedly that NATO had the sheer temerity to tell Russia that if it genuinely wanted to join NATO (or merge NATO with CSTO, which was one of Putin’s own ideas about 23 years ago) was SEND IN AN APPLICATION TO JOIN NATO. The rules for Ukraine are exactly the same as the rules for Russia.
Putin reckons they’d never have let Russia join NATO even though nobody ever said “no” to him on this subject. But all he had to do to test his theory was send in an application. Either it would’ve been vetoed on day one rendering NATO accession impossible (therefore, Ukraine’s application if ever made would’ve met the same fate, proving his excuse for invading Ukraine was bullshit), or Russia would’ve been accepted for a very long-winded, ten-year process of standards alignment before a final vote by existing NATO members (which is the same process Ukraine would’ve had to go through) and he’d have zero credible reason to complain about Ukraine doing the EXACT SAME THING AS RUSSIA.
Smart people can tell that Putin isn’t genuinely enraged by that statement at all; he’s just feigning outrage because it’s a great way to cover up his real intension while exploiting the utterly intergalactic levels of gullibility in the Russia’s Useful Idiots camp.
And you’ve got to admire Putin’s brass neck there. Before 2008 Putin used to say even on Russian TV that it was none of Russia’s business if Ukraine joined NATO or the EU. But he also tried to blackmail, and in one case assassinate, Ukrainian politicians who he thought were accelerating “Europeanisation”. He tried to kill Yuschenko for that reason, despite Yuschenko actually losing the Presidency election to someone who leant more towards Moscow. And, he’s the same guy who professed friendship to Chechnya before bombing his own city to create an excuse to flatten Grozny.
As you yourself have observed, Ukraine was having a perfectly civil debate between East/West alignment without any spill-over into violence, and without even a shred of hostility towards Russia, until AFTER Putin had spend a whole year threatening and blackmailing the Azarov government and President Yanukovych, and playing fuel blackmail with the oil pipelines, and flooding the Donbas with fake separatists to stir up previously non-existent tensions.
That’s the kind of guy Putin really is.
While being handed a VIP seat at the Council of Europe, and a VIP Rolls-Royce level invitation to EU NATO headquarters, Putin was orchestrating cyber attacks against the USA and EU.
While Ukraine’s politicans were falling over each other to keep Putin happy, Putin was preparing to screw them all over and provoke a bloody civil war in Ukraine.
Even as Zelensky was dismantling Azov as well as steadily rolling back the laws his predecessor had brought in, inching towards Minsk 2 compliance, Putin was egregiously violating the only Minsk condition he had to honor - still flooding the Donbas with fake separatists, still using political and financial interference to undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty, and still parking his tanks up near the border, ready to invade Ukraine.
Merkel spent a decade bending over backwards to respect Russia’s interests at Ukraine’s expense, before eventually conceding after watching Putin literally break Minsk 1 before the ink had even dried, that negotiating with Putin is the complete opposite of dealing with someone who’ll ever negotiate in good faith.
“As the United States and Allies reaffirmed in the June 2021 NATO Summit Communique, the United States supports Ukraine’s right to decide its own future foreign policy course free from outside interference, including with respect to Ukraine’s aspirations to join NATO.”
So what? Putin had literally said the exact same thing, himself, unprompted, on Russian television.
Difference between the USA and Putin is, the USA told us what it was going to do, in full compliance with the UN Charter, Belovezha Accords and Budapest Memorandum - while Putin claims to support these things on camera but then proves the complete opposite through his actions.
“Russia’s response was to call for a security conference, and this was finally rejected by the Biden White House in December of 2021.”
Oh, FFS. This? Now you’re REALLY proving yourself to be a useful, unthinking idiot.
https://mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/rso/nato/1790803/?lang=en
That is the actual text of what the USA rejected in December 2021, on Russia’s own official website. How about you read it and tell us how on God’s green earth you think its entirety was something that ANY American president could ever have signed up to.
1. “The Russian Federation and all the Parties that were member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as of 27 May 1997, respectively, shall not deploy military forces and weaponry on the territory of any of the other States in Europe in addition to the forces stationed on that territory as of 27 May 1997.”
The USA doesn’t even have the power to unilaterally unwind the NATO borders back to where it was in May 1997. NATO is a club of 30 countries with a voice, it is not like the CSTO faux-alliance where only one country really calls all the shots and the rest just do as they’re told.
2. “The Parties shall not deploy land-based intermediate- and short-range missiles in areas allowing them to reach the territory of the other Parties.”
Putin’s Russia had been making such deployments even while it was drafting this garbage document. How dumb would a USA President have to be to agree to a condition Russia was ALREADY intentionally violating?
3. “All member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization commit themselves to refrain from any further enlargement of NATO, including the accession of Ukraine as well as other States.”
Why should they agree to that? Because Putin’ll war with them if they don’t? Hardly a great way to sell the merits of this “we’re not at war, but we’re sure acting like we want to be...” nonsense document. Under UN and NATO Charters, this demand is bollocks.
Putin just needs to understand, his own actions are what make CSTO such a toxic club that half of its remaining membership doesn’t really want to stay in the club any more. That’s not the fault of the West; it’s the consequence of Putin’s chauvinism and revanchism. NATO shouldn’t have to water itself down to compensate for Russia-CSTO’s utter inadequacy.
4. “The Parties that are member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization shall not conduct any military activity on the territory of Ukraine as well as other States in the Eastern Europe, in the South Caucasus and in Central Asia.”
Demanding the Warsaw Pact be restored by NATO itself, on NATO alliance members, while expecting that to pass a unanimous ballot of NATO alliance members, is literally on the same level of utterly intergalactic retardation as having some lunatic foreign country demand the USA confine its military activity to only 35 of its United States, and demilitarise the other 15.
There’s no way any sane American would ever say yes to this demand if it was being made on the Continental USA, and for the exact same reason there is no way any sane European, eastern European, or Brit, would ever agree to it on their turf.
You glossed right over that one, chief.
We both know why.
Alright, since you asked:
Even in 2022 and 2023, the settled position of ALL of European NATO’s member countries - including France and Germany, and Slovakia and Hungary - was that it while the NATO “open door policy” has been there since the very start of NATO, Ukraine can’t be told it can’t apply - but even if it does apply, they’d rather not annoy Russia by saying yes.
Don’t believe me?
It’s literally all of the European NATO leaders telling Putin, in a roundabout fashion, that Ukraine will only join NATO when (a) pigs are flying; (b) Russia has confirmed (through its deeds rather than its words) that it doesn’t object to Ukraine joining NATO, and (c) Ukraine has met all of the criteria for the 32 countries to all vote yes (and these criteria range from taking 10-20 years to hit, to impossibly high bars). So, in practice, it’ll never happen.
There’s not even a consensus in EU-NATO in favour of rubber-stamping a draft Membership Action Plan for Ukraine to follow.
Why do you think Zelensky said this in 2022? “For years we have been hearing about how the door is supposedly open (to NATO membership) but now we hear that we cannot enter. And it is true, and it must be acknowledged.” (https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/15/europe/ukraine-nato-zelensky-shift)
Zelensky and Putin have both known all along, two things.
1. no application from Ukraine = no NATO membership for Ukraine, ever.
2. Just one veto from one NATO member = no NATO membership for Ukraine, ever.
Putin went on Russian TV multiple times before 2008 to say Ukraine was a free country and he had no objections to it joining either EU or NATO. Safe in the knowledge that it didn’t matter what the Bush-era neocons kept saying, Ukraine wasn’t interested in applying and Europe would’ve blocked the MAP even if they had applied.
The only thing that has FORCED Ukraine into begging to be admitted into NATO is, Ukraine’s had enough of Russia demanding Ukraine weaken itself only so that Russia can attack Ukraine more effectively, and even countries like France and Germany that once would’ve said no to Ukraine because they once believed Moscow’s bullshit promises to the effect of, there’d be peace all round if Ukraine was never admitted to NATO.
They don’t believe it because it is patently, provably false. Even when Ukraine had never applied for NATO membership, EU NATO was effectively blocking its accession, and the only government retarded enough to keep insisting Ukraine would join NATO eventually was the American one, Russia attacked Ukraine anyway.
What followed didn't address what I asked.
Why did France and Germany not want Ukraine in NATO?
You haven't stated why, but Merkel did.
That old commie is more honest than you.
I answered your question.
I’ll dumb it down.
EU NATO has no principle objections to ANY country applying to join NATO. The “open door policy” has been in place ever since the alliance was set up.
Russia can apply. Ukraine can apply. Even China could apply.
Even the USSR accepted it. But the USSR set up the Warsaw Pact to prevent countries east of the BRD from exercising that option. Some call it Detente, others call it Ostpolitik. Kowtowing to the Soviets and throwing all of Eastern Europe under the bus for half a century kept the peace that only the hardliners in the Soviet Union were jonesing to break.
Merkel was reticent because Putin has revived Ostpolitik but with the Stalin rehabilitating, Dugin following, Cand Catherine the Great worshipping Empire Restoration revisionists taking the Soviet place as the aggressor.
Her own words confirmed that she first resisted NATO invitations to Ukraine because she feared Russia would start wars (which it has done); she then resisted because it was impossible to invite Ukraine in while Russia was looking for any excuse to go on a wider attack.
Russia’s been at cyber war with Europe and the USA for two decades. They started it while Europe was falling over itself to thaw relations with Moscow. We didn’t poke the bear; the bear was poking us relentlessly without getting a slap back and the more we did nothing, the bolder Putin got.
In short, if Putin wasn’t such an Ostpolitik asshole, Merkel would have no objections to Ukraine joining NATO, and now she’s realised that forcing “strategic neutrality” onto Ukraine served nobody’s interests but Putin’s.
Which was the correct prediction, shared by ambassador Burns in his secret 2008 cable. There was no ignorance at the White House about what expansion into Ukraine would mean.
The neocons ignored the danger (in my opinion they actually embraced it because they wanted this war - the alternative is they’re extremely naive, which is possible, but at this point remote) and plowed ahead with the moves that ensured it would happen.
There’s no better grift than an active war.
You think we’d let the Chinese put bases in Canada? Or do you think that would start a war? It’s a rhetorical question for anyone who has heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In your analogy, you’re treating China as an adversary not a partner. Which means you’re not comparing like with like.
Russia, Ukraine, the EU, the UK and the USA, were all IN A NATO PARTNERSHIP TOGETHER (it was even called the “Partnership for Peace” - look it up!) and there were MULTIPLE treaties and memoranda between all of us, declaring the old Cold War enmity over and asserting that we’re all friends now, when Russia started attacking all of us.
Even if the USA had factions that couldn’t stop treating Russia like the Soviet Union, on the other side of the Atlantic we were all trying to make an effort to bring Russia in from the cold. Ukraine had elected a pro-Moscow president. Relations between Russia, Poland and the Baltic countries were thawing. Russia was GIFTED a seat at the Council of Europe. Putin was given the VIP treatment at EU NATO headquarters. The idea we were all threatening Russia is just arrant nonsense.
But, after spending 2001-2005 pretty much saying that this thawing is what he wanted, Putin and Medvedev then started tag-teaming attacks against Europe, Ukraine, the UK, and the USA too. Specifically, they:
1. Attempted to assassinate a Ukrainian presidential candidate (he lost fairly, so there wasn’t even a need to attempt a hit.)
2. Orchestrated a plane “crash” (i.e. like Prigozhin’s!) that took out a whole bunch of Polish politicians and diplomats.
3. Blackmailed eastern Europe repeatedly by interfering with the oil and gas supplies.
4. Orchestrated Cyber-attacks on Europe and the USA, from Russian state actors, Russia-sponsored criminal groups, North Korean groups, Iranian groups, and groups operating out of China. And I would not be exaggerating if I said Moscow has been specifically waging a cyber war against the USA non-stop for the last 20 years (with successive US administrations blindly pretending it isn’t happening.)
5. Used polonium and novichok on British soil to assassinate Putin’s personal enemies. Tell me, if the Russkies used radioactive weapons in an American city, deliberately, and Americans died, would you be happy if the US administration turned a blind eye?
For far too long the USA and Germany and France kept turning a blind eye to every escalation by Medvedev and Putin. Every single time Putin escalated without cause, all we got was crickets from Washington. Accompanied by the Useful Idiots bleating “For the love of God, please don’t poke the bear!” as if they weren’t acutely aware that the bear was the one doing all the poking but nobody had any idea how to slap Russia down.
I don’t think you’re seeing the big picture here. “There’s no better grift than an active war” could easily be levelled at Putin himself. He’s the ONLY one who has been jonesing for this war since COVID paranoia rotted his brain.
Ask yourself how Vladimir Zhirinovsky was so triumphantly announcing to the Duma that Ukraine was going to get a very nasty surprise on a day in late February, shortly before dawn... over a month before Putin issued an ultimatum to NATO (the December 2021 one where he basically demanded the USA unilaterally shaft the rest of NATO and rewrite its charter so that Russia had a veto even over NATO exercises on NATO soil - and if the USA did not comply, he’d invade Ukraine.)
Three months after VZ blew Putin’s surprise, Putin was still insisting that he had any invasion plans at all, and Lavrov was angrily accusing the West of fearmongering. The presenters on Rossyia 1 were all protesting that it’d be UTTERLY UNTHINKABLE that Russia would ever stoop so low as to invade its beloved brother.
Within two weeks Putin had launched his invasion, and was in the process of criminalising any overt protest against the invasion. So if you believe Putin was dragged reluctantly into this quagmire rather than this quagmire being one that he, personally, had been planning for over a year, then I’ve got three London Bridges and a six-pack of Eiffel Towers to sell you.
According to Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev, in 1993 Yeltsin had been led to believe that Partnership for Peace would be an alternative to NATO membership, not a program for it, although the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service, Yevgeny Primakov, told him this was a way to begin NATO expansion. Yeltsin still authorized Russia to become a member of the PfP on 22 June 1994, but later said he felt betrayed after NATO declared that PfP was a path to membership in December 1994. In early 1995 he changed Russia's policy as being opposed to any NATO expansion.
https://transatlanticrelations.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/19-Kozyrev.pdf
Orchestrated a plane “crash” (i.e. like Prigozhin’s!) that took out a whole bunch of Polish politicians and diplomats.
Your buy in on this conspiracy casts some doubt on your other conclusions. Air Disasters committed an episode to this event, and even includes your political conspiracy theory, but it wasn't determined to be the cause. Pilot error during a landing attempt in the fog at a strip without ILS was the cause:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui21EV4zoPA
You can fast forward to ~36min for an explanation of the pilots' mistaken assumption and how it led to the crash.
Every single time Putin escalated without cause
This presumes Russia should perceive no threat from a NATO that was demonstrably willing to attack and partition neighboring states without UN authorization. If you recognize that reality, you can recognize why Russia didn't want NATO for a neighbor. They didn't want the NATO (read: U.S.) to have a higher military potential to intervene in a separatist like Chechnya the way they intervened in Kosovo. The NATO regime change effort in Libya was even more egregious, and only reinforced their fears and determination to avoid NATO as a neighbor.
So if you believe Putin was dragged reluctantly into this quagmire rather than this quagmire being one that he, personally, had been planning for over a year
I don't believe, and have never stated, that Russian planning for what to do the event NATO ignored further warning didn't start until after the neocons rejected the Russians last bid for a new security arrangement that took all parties concerns into consideration.
Ah. Thanks for the insights.
We’ll have to agree to disagree 8 suppose.
On the p4p, the opposition to it potentially leading to membership of NATO is a bizarre one. Putin himself floated the idea of joining NATO, or uniting CSTO and NATO. NATO and Russia were no longer in a cold war, let alone in a hot war.
That take of “betrayal” is a misdirect. Actually, it’s a statement to the effect of, a faction inside Russia wanted the might of the USSR back. It mourned the end of the Cold War and Warsaw Pact. It rejected the Belovezha Accords. It still wrapped itself in the hammer and sickle. It hated all forms of Europeanisation and westernisation. And it lapped up Dugin’s blueprint for restoring a Russian Empire.
Russia never applied for NATO membership before 2022 and neither did Ukraine, so we’ll never know what would’ve happened if they’d both done it. Perhaps it would’ve put the Duginist philosophy out to pasture.
That leads into the unanswerable question.
If NATO expansion was ever a genuine beef, rather than a useful bit of fiction that excused Russian revanchism and chauvinism,
1. why did Russia start attacking Ukraine in the early 2000s even though it had settled all border disputes and went on to elect a Russia-friendly president?
2. Why did Putin then do absolutely nothing while Poroshenko was president? Poroshenko was the one who introduced anti Russian policies and handed the Banderites power within the military.
3. Why did Putin step up attacks only after Zelensky had literally just spent a whole year dismantling Azov and driving a collapse in the fighting- leading to monthly casualties plummeting from 50+ under Poroshenko to less than 15 under Zelensky? (Jan 2022 even the FSB backed monitor recorded just six across the whole Donbas - None of them civilians.) The only thing Putin was asked to do in return was pull Wagner out of the Donbas, and let the fake dpr and lpr governments prove they had popular support... but he never did it because those fakers were complaining daily that NOBODY wanted to join up.
That’s the problem. Russia’s narrative is contradicted even by their own intelligence agencies. Who were telling us as well as the Kremlin that the fake LDPR had zero backing inside the Donbas even from the Russian community, and the only thing keeping them in power was the flood of Little Green Men, and Wagner.
Same MO as Belarus, where Lukashenko lost the popular vote and would’ve been replaced by a Western leaning opponent if Russia hadn’t interfered to prop him up.
People much closer to the matter than you reject your narrative:
In his book, Burns [ed note: Fluent Russian speaker who was Ambassador to Russia under Bush and CIA Director under Biden] says over and over that Russians of all ideological stripes—not just Putin—loathed and feared NATO expansion. He quotes a memo he wrote while serving as counselor for political affairs at the US embassy in Moscow in 1995. ‘Hostility to early NATO expansion,” it declares, “is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.” On the question of extending NATO membership to Ukraine, Burns’ warnings about the breadth of Russian opposition are even more emphatic. “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” he wrote in a 2008 memo to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
His observations were ignored (or perhaps counted on) by the neocons, and we got the predicted war as consequence.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.