[psd1]

You're not exactly wrong, but it's disingenuous to paint the expansion of a defensive alliance of independent nations in the same light as annexation of sovereign nations by military force.

For accuracy, replace "NATO" with "countries united in condemnation of Russia's invasion".

The iron curtain pushed west on tanks; it's being pushed back by choice. Russia inoculated citizens against its own propaganda by disappearing their friends and loved ones. Read Solzhenitsyn.

[einpoklum]

> of a defensive alliance

NATO is an offensive alliance, and its activities in this century have demonstrated this. Unless you mean "defensive" as in the now-renamed US "Department of Defense".

> of independent nations

Also, many of its members are only partially independent, when it comes to global strategic matters. And that's not getting into whether EU member nations are in fact independent; I can introduce you to many greek people who would say otherwise... Many Brittons also consider their state to be somewhat subservient to the US on such matters.

> annexation of sovereign nations by military force.

Hey, that consideration didn't bother Ukraine in taking control of Crimea when the USSR broke up...

To be less facetious though: Ukraine's sovereignty after the 2014 coup, and certainly by 2022, was also imperfect. To the level of Biden as US VP exercising veto power over who serves as their attorney general.

But certainly, the annexation of the Zaporizhia and Kherson oblasts is such an annexation from a technically sovereign state. With Donetsk and Lugansk, Russia did not annex; those areas seceded from Ukraine, declared independence and fought a protracted war against the Ukrainian Army for some years. They also faced quite a bit of regular shelling targeting the civilian population, from their presumptive sovereign. Eventually, albeit under Russian influence, they asceded into the Russian Federation.

Be that as it may - like I said, NATO is involved to the extent that it should rightly be seen as a proxy war of NATO against Russia.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> Ukraine's sovereignty after the 2014 coup

This phrasing, referring to the Maidan in 2014 as a "coup" is reliable indicator of pro-Russia crankery.

> With Donetsk and Lugansk, Russia did not annex; those areas seceded from Ukraine, declared independence

Yep, here is more of it.

[mopsi]

  > With Donetsk and Lugansk, Russia did not annex; those areas seceded from Ukraine, declared independence and fought a protracted war against the Ukrainian Army for some years.

The European Court of Human Rights investigated this in their verdict relating to the shootdown of the Malaysian airliner. The court found no evidence of any separatist movement, any seccession or independence. Instead, the court found that the whole thing had been under Russian military command from the get-go, carried out by a mix of Russian military, operatives of special services and local collaborators acting under direct orders from Russians.

The verdict: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/?i=001-244292

Key part:

  The reality of the relationship between the separatists on the one hand and the respondent State [Russia] on the other was such that, whatever their legal status, the separatists were completely dependent on military, political and economic support from the respondent State to carry out their activities and were, ultimately, a mere instrument of that State. It is for these reasons that the Court was persuaded that, from 11 May 2014, the relationship of the separatists to the Russian Federation was so much one of dependence on the one side and control on the other that it would be right to equate the separatists in the “DPR” and the “LPR” with de facto organs of the Russian Federation, within the meaning of Article 4 ARSIWA. Any other solution would allow States to avoid their Convention obligations by choosing to act through entities whose supposed independence is purely fictitious.

There's nothing new about this. Russians did the same in the 1940s when they invaded Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. They staged coups, created fake "people's governments", and those governments promptly asked to be absorbed by Russians. The same was attempted with Finland too. For a short period, an absurd fictitious entity called the Finnish Democratic Republic existed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_Democratic_Republic

At this point, it's such a common Russian strategy that in several European countries children learn about in the middle school, from the times when it was used against their own countries.

[einpoklum]

> The "Europe Court of Human Rights"(

Why do you see that institute as the authority on the secession of Donetsk and Lugansk? Both in principle, and considering how the legal procedure you refer to was purely ex-parte, by an institute of an entity belligerent to Russia, so that both the court and the parts involved were all hostile to it.

> Russians did the same in the 1940s*

So, going back to the cold war is insufficient, you want to make analogies to Stalin's USSR in the 1940s? That's almost all the way to Godwin's law.

Still, you are making my point, in that the war in Ukraine is perceived as NATO's war, or the US-and-EU's war, to fend off the evil Russians like in the old days.

[mopsi]

  > Why do you see that institute as the authority on the secession of Donetsk and Lugansk? 

It is one of the most respected courts on the planet, and the verdict is long and detailed when it comes to describing the smokescreen Russians deployed to hide their role. All the key facts are nicely laid out, notable people and events are mentioned.

Nothing described there is meaningfully contested by anyone other than talking heads on the Russian state TV and the cheap whores who parrot their talking points in the west. The commander of the 2014 invasion force is a public figure and used to hold multi-hour livestreams where he talked about the same things; namely, that his forces were directly responsible for the war, and that there was no groundroots support for them among the locals in Ukraine. He often complained that the 2014 invasion stalled because Moscow did not allocate him enough soldiers, tanks and artillery to work with.

  > So, going back to the cold war is insufficient, you want to make analogies to Stalin's USSR in the 1940s? That's almost all the way to Godwin's law.

Not at all. There are more recent examples too, from the 1990s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abkhazia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnistria

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Ossetia

Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are just some of the oldest examples of this. At this point, you have to be intentionally trolling to take these "people's republics" propped up by Russian military with any credibility. Russians have been abusing the concept of peoples' right to self-determination for about as long as the concept has existed, to justify territorial expansion.

  > Still, you are making my point, in that the war in Ukraine is perceived as NATO's war, or the US-and-EU's war, to fend off the evil Russians like in the old days.

No, the level of US and European involvement does not warrant such framing. North Korea has gone further than any of them and deployed actual troops by tens of thousands to the frontlines in support of Russia, and yet nobody calls it a North Korean-Ukrainian war because that would be a poor description of the nature of this war.