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I am not desperate, but astonished why you remain stuck reposting the same garbage-tier propaganda narratives instead of actually learning about the events from high quality sources. (1) Relations between Ukraine and Russia have been very poor for a very long time. For example, throughout the early 2000s, Russia tried to extort Ukraine through gas supply cutoffs. The poisoning of Ukrainian president by Russian agents in 2004 marked an especially sharp deterioration of relations. At least by European standards, this is very far from anything described as normal. (2) There was no coup in Ukraine. The pro-Russian president Yanukovych got 108 people killed when he mismanaged his response to protests, lost all support he had in Ukraine overnight (even his own party turned on him), and ran away into hiding in Russia as he was about to get criminally charged and jailed. Ukrainian parliament assembled, voted unanimously to hold snap elections, which were held a few months later and recognized as legitimate by everyone, including Russia. (3/1) NATO is not some expanding organism that keeps swallowing countries. Rather, Russia's western neighbours have joined the military alliance to bolster their national security as a reaction to Russian democracy deteriorating into a hostile totalitarian dictatorship. Sweden, for instance, abandoned 200 years of neutrality because military experts assessed that Russia can attack without a reason, and that Sweden would not be able to withstand alone the kind of attack that Russia has launched on Ukraine, and therefore needs to have access to the pooled resources of the entire NATO, which are especially vital to protect cities from missile attacks. (3/2) Central and Eastern Europe has not seen any foreign military bases in the 20-30 years that they have been in NATO. Russian trolls love to talk about missile bases being built on Russian borders, but not a single such site exists. Until Russia attacked Ukraine, European military preparedness was at record lows, and Cold War era infrastructure was in the process of being dismantled. The present difficulties of the European NATO members in assembling a combined force of 25 000 soldiers for a peacekeeping mission in Ukraine is an excellent illustration of this. Prior to the invasion, the military balance in Europe was slowly tipping in favor of Russia, not against. It's undeniable if you look at the numbers. Europe was on the last stretch of disarming itself, with Germany being the best example: of the ~5000 tanks in 1980s, only ~200 remained. All while Russia was running a massive army modernization program and pumping out that many tanks each year. |