I have not kept track of exactly who made which outrageous claims, but at least one poster said Russia's problem with NATO went back to not just Putin, but Yeltsin before him and even Gorbachev before that!
The fact is that under Yeltsin (from 1992 on), Russia was on a path to NATO membership, and even Putin in his early years (early 2000s) was not opposed.
But Putin wanted NATO membership on Putin's terms, not on NATO's terms and so slowly Russia drifted away from the path taken by countries like Estonia or Romania.
I identify 2008 as the watershed year, when Russia-NATO relations shifted from mostly positive and cooperative to strained and even hostile.
2008 was the year Putin invaded Georgia and Pres. Bush advocated Georgia and Ukraine join NATO.
From that point on, Putin grew increasingly hostile.
WinstonSmith: "Maybe just maybe you could take a step back.
Now if you’re Ukrainian, I get it.
But from a US citizens stand point, we have allowed really stupid and naive people to take over our foreign policy and I am sorry about that... but following up bad decision with more naivety and stupidity will only get more people killed in the long run... Literally Billion of People will get killed if we don’t take a realist approach."
You may remember the Cold War, it lasted some 45 years, nearly all of them under the threat of nuclear Armageddon, if somebody hit the wrong button.
I grew up in the Cold War and served in the US Army during it and I remember the MAD doctrine.
And crazy as it sounds, MAD did keep the peace all that time.
And of course, it would be strictly a historical curiosity except for this fact: so did and so does Vladimir Putin.
Putin is also a child of the Cold War and he knows all about the nuclear gamesmanship that Soviets played throughout that period.
And at no time during the Cold War were the Soviets ever insane or suicidal.
They played the nuclear threat game, but it always ended short of war.
So I don't think Putin is suicidal, I don't think he wants to bring Armageddon down on Russia, but I do think he see us as weak and perhaps easily frightened.
And he's going to try to frighten us.
Our problem is Putin's invasion of Ukraine is the the test of our time.
Will we repeat the mistakes of the French and British in the 1930s as Hitler gobbled up one little country after another, until there was no stopping Hitler short of a total world war?
Or will we stand strong and force Putin to back down on a small scale, before his ambitions & capabilities have grown beyond management?
Bottom line: what you here call a "realist approach" is simply Neville Chamberlain in drag, nothing else.
You will get "peace in our time" and it will last until Putin or the next Hitler wannabe decides to try his luck on an even bigger scale.
I'm sorry, but those are the facts, wish them away if you want, they remain facts.