[radu_floricica]

Skimmed the link. This is... I'm struggling to say this nicely, but taking it at face value, it pretty much implies Russia should be treated as an animal instead of a rational actor. tl;dr of it is "don't poke the bear".

Everything in that thread makes sense only with the assumption that Russia is not integrated in the global community and is still seeing things as a zero-sum game. This is the key here. Everybody else is _not_ seeing things as a zero-sum game. "you get this country, or we get this country".

90% of europe is living in a state of mind where border control buildings have already been razed down. We don't get this "control area" or "buffer country" concepts anymore, they're obsolete.

Let me give you a concrete example. I'm Romanian. Moldova is pretty obviously part of Romania, but for historical reasons (coughrussiacough) is now a separate country. We could theoretically go for reunion, but there are issues (coughrussia*cough). But we don't WANT to go for a union. We'd like it, it'd be nice, but it's, again, an obsolete concept. Gone with the 20th century. Archaic. What we want is for Moldova to be part of the EU, and ideally all of us part of Schengen, so we can trade with them and go there freely. Who cares if they have their own parliament or not. Fuck all that shit.

So when you say that "NATO expansion caused Russia's invasion of Ukraine" I can only look in disbelief. It makes no sense here. Did you even try to be part of NATO? EU? no? You like being your own little empire with a total economy slightly larger than Italy's? Well, good luck to you then, but the sympathy you're getting from me is dead zero.