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Comment by thethethethe | Hacker News Reader

I'll take that you live in Russia, therefore you do need some enlightenment.

If Russia weren't obsessed with imperial domination then NATO wouldn't even have a reason to exist. NATO is an expensive enterprise that needs a reason to exist. Russia's repeated violation of other countries sovereignty (Syria, Georgia, Crimea) are not "valid security concerns", they are actually validating NATO's reason to exist.

The West never invited Ukraine into NATO. Russia is the one that gave Ukraine real strong reasons to do so.

> In reality, the American political elite wanted this conflict to happen because it will make Europe dependent on American oil and gas.

And I am "pedestrian"? Please, go lighter on vodka.

I'm an American actually. It's pretty ironic that you're saying that Russia is obsessed with imperial domination when you're comparing it to the United States which has over 800 military bases spread across dozens of countries all around the world, is literally occupying multiple countries with tens of thousands of troops right now including Japan, Germany and Australia, has overthrown dozens of regimes it didn't like all around the world and has completely destroyed two entire countries on the opposite side of the planet in the last two decades. If that's not imperial hegemony, I'm not sure what is.

Also, the West never explicitly invited Ukraine into NATO but they repeatedly refused to say the door was closed for two decades.

> United States which has over 800 military bases spread across dozens of countries all around the world, is literally occupying multiple countries with tens of thousands of troops right now including Japan, Germany and Australia

Having soldiers and military bases in foreign countries isn't occupation when their governments invited you.

I never said that the US was "occupying" all countries it has bases in. For the countries mentioned, they are definitely occupied. The governments are okay with it because they are subordinate to the US. Also, two of the three countries mentioned the United States defeated in war and has been occupying ever since.

For some reason I can't reply to the other comment so I am replying to my own comment.

Just because they said it's over doesn't mean it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_of_US_military_presen...

Same thing for Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Army_ins...

That's verifiably false. US occupation of most of Germany ended in 1955, and of Berlin in 1990. US occupation of most of Japan ended in 1952, and of the Ryukyu Islands in 1972.

NATO was created as a defensive pact to combat Stalin's explicit intentions to conquer the parts of Europe he didn't manage to get at Jałta (his diplomats in late fourties openly said "Jewropa nasza" - "Europe is ours"). It never had any offensive intentions. Nobody in the West wants to conquer Moscow, that would seem like a pointless excercise in XXI century, in which power is made through economic forces and there's no more need to use violence.

It doesn't matter whether the West is going to attack or not. No country wants an adversary at on their boarder, let alone at the single weakest point of entry to the country

No need to imagine, there already were enemy rockets on Cuba and it was not solved in such a moronic way as Putin does.

Also, Ukraine alone wouldn't be sufficient to make Russians feel safe. That would require forcing whole middle third of Europe neutral, the whole swath of land from Belarus down to Yugoslavia with hundred million people, and expecting that to work is very naive. Would be problematic even with both Americans and Russians avoiding any heavy handed moves which is also naive expectation.

> No need to imagine, there already were enemy rockets on Cuba and it was not solved in such a moronic way as Putin does

What is the bay of pigs? United States tried to invade Cuban overthrow their government in the '60s as well. How did that go? The United States also weighed more extreme options like all out military invasion instead of a tactical invasion. We can thank JFK for not doing that.

I am not trying to defend Putins war or tactics, I am just pushing back on the notion that he is a mad man with no reason behind his actions other than his ego, greed, and glory. This is the simple narrative the American media wants you to believe so you don't notice that they actually wanted this war to happen.

Almost third of Europe is already neutral. Also I never said that, I was just referring to Ukraine, which is clearly of the most geostrategic significance to Russia.

Say I would like to believe something other than the "simple narrative"... then what is it, where is the actual strategy? All I see Putin doing last decade is alienating neighbors.

Strategy and narrative are not the same thing. I talked about my options regarding narrative vs reality in my other comments.

But yeah, I agree that pissing off your neighbors seems like a bad strategy. Though, if you look at recent history when Russia did the same thing to other neighboring countries like chechenya, Georgia, and Ukraine in 2014, Russia handily got away with this kind of aggression, so I don't think it's too unreasonable to think that Russian leaders bet they can do it again.

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