Positions of Two NATO Ships Were Falsified Near Russian Black Sea Naval Base

Russia's strategy in Eastern Europe and more recently in Crimea was not to fight, but send in little green men with rifles and organise elections. That's how the USSR has installed regimes of their choice in its vassal states which later formed the Warsaw Pact.

NATO and thd US has a new bogeyman called China now. Russua has its own version of NATO called the CSTO and is part of the SCO or Shanghai Pact along with China and their satellite states.

I'm pretty sure that the reason Poland is afraid of Russia isn't because the US keeps talking about "scary Russia". It's because it's had bitter experience with Russia, going back to the partition of 1772, then the second partition, the third partition, then World War II and the Warsaw Pact occupation. If you were Poland, and that was your neighbor, and you saw what your neighbor just did to Ukraine, would you really need the US to keep saying "scary Russia"? Or would you be running for NATO membership as hard as you could, because of the objective reality of what had happened, and was continuing to happen?

While it was a sign of being more comfortable with the US than the USSR, for many it was more a hedge against an eventual resurgence of Germany than a perceived imminent Soviet threat. Which, sure, looking back from after the Cold War seems a bit weird, but from the perspective of the immediate aftermath of the two World Wars with a short breathing space in between is less so.

> It should also be noted that Russia's claim to join NATO was rejected in 1954,

No, Russia’s suggestion that if appropriate changes to the structure and character of NATO were made it might be interested in discussing joining (not a “claim to join”), made as part of a multipronged strategy to disrupt the formation of European Defense Community, promote the demobilization of Western European militaries, and gradually push the US out of Europe (which everyone could see at the time, but we know for certain now because we have thr internal Soviet Foreign Ministry memos as the strategy developed) was given a hard pass.

> and Putin has stated that he has suggested Russia joining NATO to Clinton and was again rejected.

Russia was admitted to NATO’s Partnership for Peace, a membership on-ramp program, in 1994, and NATO has been pretty clear about the path forward if Russia wants full membership. Russia’s not interested in membership (though it may have been when it joined PfP), only disruption, so it hasn’t made any recent steps on that path, but that's Russia’s decision.

> but why was post-USSR crumbling and then Western-friendly Russia rejected?

Russia made a bit of progress toward membership during its brief Western-friendly phase, with the support of the Alliance. The 2000 discussions where Putin floated the suggestion of joining were after that period. It was a nonserious empty propaganda maneuver.

> I'll suggest that it was because US would then lose its favourite boogeyman.

Nah, by then Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a bigger boogeyman than Russia; sure, the US had conflict—and almost, in the Balkans in the late 1990s, direct armed conflict—with Russia, but the US government publicly downplayed that conflict, rather than treating Russia as a boogeyman. Russia didn't really get back boogeyman status until it forced its way back to it with its invasions of Ukraine.

In light of your comment, how do you describe Russia's attack on Georgia and Ukraine, as well as it's threats directed at not only Baltic countries but also Poland?