“Putin wants a buffer between Russia and NATO.”
Either that’s just one of the many cards in his rolodex of manufactured excuses that don’t hold up to scrutiny, or Putin’s judgement is so impaired that he shouldn’t be trusted to in charge of a bagel stall let alone a country.
Take your pick.
Before Putin even entered politics the Soviet Union as well as over a dozen countries in Europe had already settled the borders between Russia and its neighbors, underpinning “détente”. The Helsinki Final Accords achieved this in the seventies; the Belovezha Accords (drafted by a triumvirate of Russian, Belarussian and Ukrainian presidents) OFFICIALLY reaffirmed not just the borders, but also the principle that the Russian Federation was the successor to the Russian Republic, not the whole USSR. In effect, Putin knows Russia has no valid claim or jurisdiction over Belarus, Ukraine, or any of the Warsaw Pact countries.
The proof of this is literally there in the top line of the Belovezha Accords - at the behest of the Russian leader, it declared the “geopolitical reality” of the USSR “no longer exists”.
Putin himself, in his first term as president, publicly admonished Russian revanchists who argued that Russia should be the boss of its “little brother” Ukraine - and in at least one televised response he even went as far as saying explicitly that if Ukraine wanted to join NATO or the EU then that was for Ukraine to decide, not for Russia.
Yanukovych, Azarov, and all of Poroshenko’s other predecessors, had repeatedly said they weren’t interested in joining NATO at all. EU NATO, Germany and France especially, made it abundantly clear that if Ukraine ever applied to join NATO, they’d veto it. If even one NATO member vetos an application to join, the application is dead in the water.
So Putin LITERALLY had nothing rational to worry about, unless he gave the likes of Ukraine, Sweden and Finland, an existential reason to join NATO that they’d never have if Russia wasn’t being the aggressor.
This is why the “don’t poke the Russian bear” anti-NATO-expansion stuff was utter nonsense on stilts. It’s only because Russia kept poking EU NATO and Ukraine with serial political interference, stirring up dissidents, Cyber attacks and fuel blackmail, that eventually forced even die-hard “don’t poke the bear” merchants like Angela Merkel to wake up. Since the bear insisted on poking the honey badger, you can’t keep on telling the honey badger not to poke the bear back.
It isn’t just Merkel who had to rethink her fawning capitulation to Russian “sensitivities”. Zelensky was a Russian speaking anti-Azov moderate who was treated as an ally by the Muscovy media before he entered politics. Zelensky might not have been Moscow’s preferred candidate but he presided over a near-complete end to state-sponsored hostile actions against Russian interests between 2019 and 2022. By Jan 2022, under ten casualties a month (on both sides) were being recorded even by the FSB in the Donbas - and they were almost all combatants. That wasn’t even close to being an “ongoing genocide”. It was barely even big enough to be called a turf war between two rival gangs.
Zelensky NOW wants NATO membership, but the only reason for that is Putin has literally forced him into wanting something that he never wanted and not even the hardline nationalists in charge in Ukraine before he became President hadn’t wanted.
Putin’s irrational fear of NATO is literally only given a figleaf of rationality as a result of Putin’s serial aggressions eventually forcing even pro-Russian actors like Merkel and Zelensky into recognising that under its current leadership, Russia IS threatening eastern Europe and being in NATO is the only effective defence.
“Finnland joined NATO (on the Russian border). Sweden joined NATO (not on the border but close). It used to be neutral. Poland is arming up. Nato has become much stronger. Europe is much more afraid of Russia.”
Exactly. NATO expansion isn’t the cause of Putin’s irrational fears; NATO expansion in the 21st Century is entirely the effect of Putin’s irrational fears creating a rational, credible threat to their security.
Why did Germany and France oppose Ukrainian admission to NATO? Because they accurately predicted the consequence. There's no other reason.
So Putin LITERALLY had nothing rational to worry about, unless he gave the likes of Ukraine, Sweden and Finland, an existential reason to join NATO that they’d never have if Russia wasn’t being the aggressor.
That was still true until the coup, and the coup government then put NATO ascension into their constitution. Even that wouldn't be a particularly nasty problem for the Russians, except that NATO after the fall of the Soviet Union was no longer simply a defensive alliance. It was used as an international imprimatur to attack and partition Serbia (coincidentally, a historical Russian ally) and to assist jihadists in regime change in Libya. In neither case was NATO involvement the consequence of 'defense' of the members.
This is why the “don’t poke the Russian bear” anti-NATO-expansion stuff was utter nonsense on stilts.
There are hundreds of thousands of people now dead who might characterize the dangers of provoking Russia differently, if they could still speak.
The neocon NATO expansion has only achieved the war NATO was supposed to prevent. Utter foreign policy failure.
This CSPAN clip from June 18, 1997 better than anything highlights how poorly neocons predict the outcome of their actions:
In the clip then Senator Biden mocks Russia and says of their opposition to eastward NATO expansion, 'what are you gonna do, ally with China and Iran? That's not an option.' Well, here we are...