The international situation has apparently left many people confused

> Greetings from a Finnish leftist! The international situation has apparently left many people in the English-speaking countries confused. I write this thread in the hopes of sharing a perspective I believe is widely if not unilaterally shared in Finland, most leftists included.

[...]

> This has very little if anything to do with NATO, and almost everything to do with Putin's desire to reinstate the Russian Empire. He has consistently maintained in public that it was a "mistake" to "allow" the former Soviet republics to become independent.

> Now he said out loud that Lenin made an error in 1917 when he let the former Russian territories "go." One of the countries that gained independence from Russia in 1917, by the way, was Finland.

> What Putin seems to fear the most, rightly so, is that democratic revolution reaches Moscow. Thus, democracy itself is a threat to him.

> He is not really afraid of NATO military forces: we can objectively demonstrate that the deployment of NATO forces to countries close to Russia used to be laughably minuscule before 2014.