At the moment it has three threats: (1) the European Union and NATO, which could be at its doorstep if Ukraine continues to move towards the West (just as would have happened w/Georgia prior to the 2008 war)
Hogwash. NATO is only on Russia’s border because Russians have a nasty habit of periodically murdering their neighbors. Naturally, the neighboring countries of Russia do not want to be under Russian hegemony. We can see how much of a threat the EU is to Russia. Putin is busy committing war crimes, invading his neighbors with a fifth column and the EU has done NOTHING.
I'm not going to disagree, but I'd note two things: (1) that trait is hardly unique to the Russians (the English, Japanese, Chinese, Germans, etc. also have rather unneighborly histories; (2) other countries have a long history of invading Russia or, failing that, intervening in its internal political conflicts.
Naturally, the neighboring countries of Russia do not want to be under Russian hegemony.
Of course they don't. But so what? It's never easy to be a smaller weaker country next to a stronger, larger one. Just ask the Poles, the Mexicans or the Irish.
Putin is busy committing war crimes, invading his neighbors with a fifth column and the EU has done NOTHING.
So what would you propose? Sending German Panzer divisions to Kharkov? Because they've tried that before.
You’re missing the point. Western Europe has invaded Russia repeatedly over the centuries. In some of our lifetimes, Germany invaded Russia with an explicit, openly stated plan to genocide the Russian people and seize their land. Napoleon invaded Russia under the banner of a universalist liberal ideology that sounded a lot like Obama-ese. It was invaded by European countries several other times in between and for centuries and centuries, parts of Russia were occupied by various European empires and kingdoms.
Russia is always going to be wary about Europe because Europe is where most of the invaders have came from, especially the recent ones.
When we discuss America’s goals and strategy, we have to deal with reality as it is. Part of that entails understanding our opponents. One of the problems with the neocon mindset is that it is so drenched with moralism, emotion and self-righteousness, that it prevents an objective understanding of things. Neocons are always screwing up, as they have in Ukraine now, by not understanding other actors and making faulty predictions about what effect their policies will have. Everything they did was banked on the assumption that Putin would allow rather militant and well armed “protesters,” with heavy American backing, including strong propaganda operations, to overthrow a democratically elected president who was Russia’s ally.
They failed miserably. You better believe that everyone in service to America at the non-political/propaganda level, especially in the military and anti-terrorism communities, is mad as hell at Nuland and these other clowns for causing this to blow up and take eyes of al-Qaeda. Just like in Iraq, they got us into a big jam we could have chosen to avoid, which is priority to number one when you are in several jams already.
The status quo in Ukraine before the coup was perfectly acceptable to us. Everyone who was involved in this scheme should be tarred and feathered, just like the Iraq war morons who delivered the whole country to the Democrats by rolling the dice and losing it all when they could have just walked past the casino.