Sovereign nations have the right to associate, or not, with other nations. And the Russian Federation is party to a treaty, the Budapest Memorandum, recognizing Ukraine's sovereignty and its 1994 borders, without restrictions what countries it can associate with or how.
This is a textbook case of an aggressive war, the supreme international crime, as were the invasions of Georgia in 2009 and Ukraine in 2014. There is a track record here, and Russia is party to the U.N. charter, and yet it has directly violated Articles 1, 2, 33, and 39.
Russia already has been given security guarantees which it is a party to. But Putin has just torn up all the prior relevant important agreements. Why bother with yet another agreement he'd presumably just reneg on?
And now Finland, Sweden, Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine are looking to either join NATO or the EU as a result of Putin's actions. On what basis should they be refused when it is Russia who just started a war of aggression for the first time since WW2? The Putin regime cannot be trusted.
https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/russias-ex-foreign-ministe...
There's a reason you only hear from him in the media when the party is trying to get people who could vote for someone else to be kept in the party.
Anyway it doesn’t matter, Putin is empire building, he made that very clear in his speech before the invasion. NATO is just an excuse to give his war of aggression the thinnest veneer of legitimacy to Russians who eat the daily Kremlin propaganda.