[spamizbad]

And yet, nearly 2 years later, at the end of '91, Yeltsin said the long-term goal of Russia was to join NATO[1]. And they were slowly moving in that direction through the aughts.

If your goal is to prevent NATO expansion, the Ukraine invasion makes no sense. In its wake it has caused multiple neutral countries to explore membership (Finland, Sweden) and has caused an otherwise austere Germany to increase defense spending. It has also laid-bare problems in the Russian military on the global stage. Massive unforced error.

The counterfactual where Russia never invaded Ukraine in 2022 or 2014, we'd still be talking about leaving NATO - something Trump was floating in 2016. There were rumblings about dissolving it prior to these actions. If Putin had simply waited, further entangled Europe into its fossil fuel industry, and continued overtures to western right-wing parties, he could have probably eliminated NATO as a "threat" to Russia within a decade. Without a single shot fired, without a soldier stepping foot on foreign soil.

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/21/world/soviet-disarray-yel...

[scotty79]

Most painful mistake was that right at the end of the cold war Russia wasn't strongly encouraged, even pressured or bribed to join NATO.

Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.

[dragonwriter]

> Most painful mistake was that right at the end of the cold war Russia wasn't strongly encouraged, even pressured or bribed to join NATO.

Because NATO works by consensus not majoritarianism, that would have given Russia a NATO veto, in effect. Despite that, Russia was on the NATO onramp from almost immediately after independence from the USSR until Putin demanded that Russia bypass the readiness criteria being applied to other new members and be immediately granted membership (and still technically was on the onramp after that, though no real progress was made between that point and when relations seriously started to degrade with Russia’s invasions of various of neighbors that were also, and more serious, NATO aspirants.)

[dfxm12]

If Putin had simply waited, ... he could have probably eliminated NATO as a "threat" to Russia within a decade.

At 70, I wonder if Putin thinks he doesn't have a decade to wait.

[spamizbad]

He was 62 when he drew up plans to invade Ukraine in 2014. But neither of those actions in 2014 and 2022 really work towards the goal of protection against a NATO threat. It's clear he had other motivations.

[MrMan]

if I were him I would see Europe as a very easy-to-manage relationship unless "viral democracy" is somehow a real threat, which I dont really believe. China is a real threat to Russia, and it seems that Putin has decided to become a supplicant to China by buying into their Us vs the West paranoia (which I also dont quite believe literally, I feel it is a rhetorical device to increase nationalism in China to keep people bonded together. )

[CapricornNoble]

Rumor mill is that he travels with a cancer doctor, and that he's dying of cancer.

[kingcharles]

Wasn't there some leaked medical records recently saying he has cancer?