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Comment by ysamjo | Hacker News Reader

From the list of Putin's demands, what should the West has conceded on??

Not necessarily Putin's demands, but there's talk of Russia asking to join NATO way-back-when: not sure if those are trustworthy, but I am pretty confident Russia would have no fear of NATO if it was not sent off, and was instead part of it.

Also, recognizing independence for Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine would have helped with the current situation too.

Yeah. I've seen a decent article recently (it's in Russian though) about Russia/NATO talks in the 90s. The felling from 'our' side seems to go like this: we tried to get into NATO or at least prevent them from moving close to our borders, but the NATO paper pushers were afraid of losing their jobs and knocked up a threat when there were none.

https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2022/02/02/natokatstvo

Edit: actually, I think the google translate version is plenty readable.

https://novayagazeta-ru.translate.goog/articles/2022/02/02/n...

This is of the main guys who did the talking in the 90s, so you might want to have a gander at it.

"Russia has no fear of NATO" => "Putin takes Baltic states".

Well, Russia being part of NATO and what the consequences are... I guess we'll never know.

What would happen if NATO seriously offered to take both Ukraine and Russia as members TODAY?

NATO would have become a dysfunctional organization. It is not about the Russian fear of NATO. Russian political system cannot get over its loss of an empire, despite us living in the XXI century. It's entirely different root of the problem..

Eastern and Western Europe would have been crazy to gamble everything on the hope that admitting Russia to NATO somehow neutralizes Russia, not NATO.

NATO exists because of Russia/USSR's bad behavior.

> Not necessarily Putin's demands, but there's talk of Russia asking to join NATO way-back-when

Putin wanted to skip the readiness steps applied to aspiring members and just be jumped in. Readiness is quite important, because NATO doesn't work by voting but consensus/unanimity.

> but I am pretty confident Russia would have no fear of NATO if it was not sent off

They weren't sent off, they were admitted to the Partnership for Peace (the onboarding path for membership) before Putin even came into office, and never formally pursued anything farther, Putin specifically indicating that he found applying the accession process used for aspiring members to Russia rather than a direct invitation for full membership improper.

> Also, recognizing independence for Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine would have helped with the current situation too.

Would it? How? Would it stopped Putin from escalating attacks from those areas and then claiming that attacks on them, combined with the historical “fact” that Ukraine was an unjustly created entity ripped from Russian territory, justified the invasion of the rest? How does that work?

> recognizing independence for Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine would have helped with the current situation too.

So what you're saying is that these states in question don't deserve the right to self-sovereignity. The people in the independent states wanted in NATO and not the other way around.

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