Without going into the merits of this war, NATO - which was supposedly a defensive alliance - did indeed attack Kosovo in an offensive.
So NATO has demonstrated they can be whatever they want when the right time comes. NATO intervention in Kosovo to “liberate it” is also being used to morally justify Russian’s invasion of eastern Ukraine, since from a Russian standpoint it’s exactly the same scenario and they are “liberating” the Russian population in those Ukrainian territories.
That’s apparently where 200,000-250,000 Serbian refugees were expected to go after the war.
But my point is that NATO is a military alliance, to call it “defensive” is just propaganda as it has shown it can be offensive too. And there is nothing wrong with simply calling it for what it is, I believe countries should be able to form military alliances, but let’s not gaslight ourselves.
This is a very naive take, I think. When you are responsible for the security of a nation, you can't just remain passive to the potential threats that shows up on your doorstep. I mean, it would be irresponsible his people if Putin did that and trusted NATO/US blindly to not cross the line, one way or another. (I mean, US could always make up some cooked up justification for the attack, like it has done so many times in the past), So if US is putting missiles near Russian border, even if that is on behalf of NATO, I think Putin is bound to do something about it..
I don't understand what part of that is "Russian propoganda"..
The Russian propaganda part is that you act as if Russia is defending, while actually they are invading.
Do the neighbors of France need an alliance against a French invasion? Do the neighbors of Germany need an alliance against a German invasion? Why not?
Publicly available, historic facts do not support the argument that russia's invasion was legally justified under any reasonable interpretation of a "threat". Claiming that they do is the propaganda mentioned above. russia is, in fact, the invader, and Ukraine did not invade russia first.
Also, you should respond to the second part of their post, as it contains a viewpoint that you might find interesting, and a question asked of your own viewpoint. Understanding others' viewpoints is a good foundation for coming to agreement.
> This should be very easy to answer, but no one ever does.
I don't think this is very easy to answer. The fact that people think it should be very easy to answer this, shows how naive they are, because the reason why country x think country y is a threat could include a lot of information and context that is not available to an external observer.
All of that is russian propaganda. Falling for obvious propagnada about NATO danger to Russia is an incredibly naive take
Russia did not invade a NATO country, they invaded Ukraine when it wasn't seeking to join NATO (in 2014 before the invasion, after the invasion they wanted to join NATO but there were too many objecting countries in NATO and it was obvious to everyone that Ukraine wasn't getting in anytime soon and this was just as true in early 2022).
> US could always make up some cooked up justification for the attack, like it has done so many times in the past
Russia has a history with making up justifications to invade and they did in this case.
> So if US is putting missiles near Russian border, even if that is on behalf of NATO, I think Putin is bound to do something about it..
They were not putting missles in the border. In fact until recently nato had minimal forces and no bases next to Russia to try to mollify them. Especially not in Ukraine which again was not in NATO and was not getting any closer to NATO. Russia was not bound to invade Ukraine and it was in fact a pretty dumb move which had obvius consequences of making Russias security much worse and even many Putin's advisors had a hard time believing he would do it.