FAIL. You're still accepting the premise of "provoking Russia" as fact. It is not fact. It is utter fiction. Demonstrably so. Ukraine's NATO and EU relationships pre-2014 were exactly the same as Russia's... NATO and Ukraine's relationship changed post-2008. What changed it?
"NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO."
https://www.nato.int/en/about-us/official-texts-and-resources/official-texts/2008/04/03/bucharest-summit-declaration
I've equally said the neocon position for decades has been utterly brainless; while European NATO was bending over backwards to invite Russia in from the cold, the neocons kept baiting Moscow by trying to invite Ukraine into NATO even though Ukraine wasn't even interested at the time.
You are correct that Ukraine wasn't interested. I can share polls from 2008-2013 demonstrating that, in addition to the outcome of the 2010 presidential election, in which East/West alignment was a distinction between candidates.
The coup changed that, and enshrined NATO membership in Ukraine's constitution.
Europe wasn't being stupid. Russia could see that. So Russia should've just accepted that the Americans banging on about Ukraine joining NATO were talking out of turn and calling for something NOBODY ELSE was calling for. Ukraine wasn't applying. Germany, France and others were saying even if Ukraine did apply they'd veto the application.
"Being stupid" about what? Why would France and Germany veto Ukrainian membership? Because, as Merkel herself said, Putin would view that as a "declaration of the war."
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/11/21/angela-merkel-delayed-ukraines-nato-bid-over-russia-fears-memoir-reveals
Ukraine and Russia both knew the neocons were talking absolute nonsense.
The problem with this viewpoint is that the history is documented, and contradicts it. Biden's neocon White House hosted a Ukrainian delegation that produced the September 1st, 2021 Joint Statement on the U.S.-Ukraine Strategic Partnership:
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.
https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/09/01/joint-statement-on-the-u-s-ukraine-strategic-partnership/
Russia's response was to call for a security conference, and this was finally rejected by the Biden White House in December of 2021. We know what came right after.
Insofar as the rejection of Realpolitik, I'd like to highlight how the U.S. and others are ignoring the last strikes by Israel in Syria:
Less AI slop scraped from the curated opinions allowed on Reddit and more real world knowledge, please.
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.