Good point. gotta love the mental gymnastics involved in holding these views simultaneously:
1. USA shouldn’t be footing the bill for keeping NATO going while Germany and others aren’t pulling their weight at all
2. Putin just couldn’t stand NATO getting more dangerous by virtue of small states with bugger all money, modern weapons or nukes stretching the NATO budgets even more thinly.
The last time Article 5 was invoked (9/11) it cane with a clarification that Article 5 is more about responding to international terrorism and asymmetric war.
“The commitment to collective self-defense embodied in the Washington Treaty was entered into in circumstances very different from those that exist now... But it remains no less valid and no less essential today, in a world subject to the scourge of international terrorism”
Does Putin think of his Russia as an international terrorist state? Or does he think he is the new Stalin in the old USSR?
They are literally the only two reasons why he could feel worried about NATO expansion.
If Putin truly believed that NATO was an aggressive organization looking for an excuse to invade Russia, he never would have risked giving them that excuse by invading Ukraine.