[sajforbes]

I disagree for three reasons:

1. While Russia warned against NATO expansion, it wasn't (and still isn't) in their power to do anything to stop it. Its actions have resulted in the expansion of NATO, a reasonably forseeable result.

2. NATO is a defensive only alliance, and can't be invoked for an invasion of Russia. If their concern is the ability of the US to store missiles and other military gear on its border, too late - the Baltics are already members. It would be an odd choice to invade purely based on the likely future expansion of an alliance that is designed to prevent you from invading its members.

3. NATO expansion or no, an independent, westward-leaning Ukraine is not an acceptable outcome. This would make NATO expansion irrelevant or at best an ancillary cause.

It's also worth noting it's not like this is the first time Russia has invaded and occupied one of its neighbours. AFAIK Georgia wasn't about to join NATO. We can't see counterfactual universes, but in my view an equally valid possibility is that NATO has stopped what is happening in Ukraine from happening in the Baltic states.

Overall the facts don't line up well with the theory that this is a response to NATO expansion, and therefore the US is to blame - it might be a factor, but more serves as a rhetorical justification Russia can use that it knows people in the US and UK can use domestically.

If you're a realist about international relations it's pretty easy to see why the UK and US might see it as in their geostrategic interest to prolong the war, and that might have been a factor. It's also worth noting there was a huge amount of public pressure for both to react. Either way, in their view, a longer war is worth it for a pro-western Ukraine, and Ukraine seems to agree. As for acting to prevent an agreement, that's largely speculation, but either way, the final choice was still Ukraine's.

[dragonwriter]

Russia is completely in the wrong here, but this is false:

> NATO is a defensive only alliance, and can't be invoked for an invasion of Russia.

NATO is a regional security alliance with a mutual defense commitment. Most of the operations for which it has been activated were not invocations of that defensive commitment, which has only happened exactly once.

[jcranmer]

> 2. NATO is a defensive only alliance, and can't be invoked for an invasion of Russia. If their concern is the ability of the US to store missiles and other military gear on its border, too late - the Baltics are already members. It would be an odd choice to invade purely based on the likely future expansion of an alliance that is designed to prevent you from invading its members.

It's worth noting that the Soviet equivalent to NATO was the Warsaw Pact, whose largest military operation was invading a member because they wanted to leave. While ostensibly a collective defensive alliance, like NATO, the Soviets treated it as a tool of binding its sphere of influence together, and it would not surprise me if the current Russian leadership sees NATO the same way, a tool by which the US government coerces its sphere of influence to do its bidding. (Needless to say, this is not an accurate view of NATO, but I suspect it is the view that Russia has of it.)

[dragonwriter]

> It's worth noting that the Soviet equivalent to NATO was the Warsaw Pact, whose largest military operation was invading a member because they wanted to leave.

I don’t think that’s quite accurate (it seems, unless I’m mistaken, to conflate elements of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968); the Hungarian revolutionaries in 1956 declared an exit from the Pact but that invasion was pure USSR, not Warsaw Pact. Czechoslovakia in 1968 had reaffirmed its intent to remain in the Pact and faithful to Marxism-Leninism just prior to the Warsaw Pact invasion.

Nevertheless, that the Soviet Union invaded two Warsaw Pact members over insufficient perceived loyalty to the USSR’s direction seems to underline your general point of the difference between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, notwithstanding any quibbles of the precise details of either invasion.