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Same MO as Belarus, where Lukashenko lost the popular vote and would’ve been replaced by a Western leaning opponent if Russia hadn’t interfered to prop him up.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.