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.