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Comment by yellowapple | Hacker News Reader

> Russia has agency but that doesnt change the fact that NATO is absolutely an existential threat to it.

NATO still exists in the first place because Russia keeps on existentially threatening the rest of Europe (and is evidently willing to make good on those threats, as Ukraine is learning the hard way).

> With the horrendous things we did to Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya... it's no wonder Russians want pushback on NATO encroachment on bordering states.

With the horrendous things Russia is currently doing to Ukraine, it's no wonder Europeans want pushback on Russian encroachment on bordering states. And unlike Russian encroachment, NATO "encroachment" is voluntary.

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>NATO still exists in the first place because Russia keeps on existentially threatening the rest of Europe

Russia was on reasonably good terms with Europe for at least 2 decades.

And during that time NATO decided it needed purpose so it decided, among other things, that it needed to destroy Libya.

The same westerners who are being whipped into a white hot rage about Ukraine collectively shrugged their shoulders about that.

For some inexplicable reason NATO fucking up Libya made Putin paranoid and unwilling to accept the potential for military expansion of this offensive alliance to the most vulnerable sections of the Russian border. I cant think why.

>With the horrendous things Russia is currently doing to Ukraine, it's no wonder Europeans want pushback on Russian encroachment

Of course they do. Everybody getting caught in this crossfire of western imperialism vs. russian imperialism is scared shitless.

>And unlike Russian encroachment, NATO "encroachment" is voluntary.

Hardly. Libya didnt ask to be torn to shreds.

Putin has always been paranoid. He's ex-KGB, yet all of you apologists claiming that NATO pushed him into the Ukraine war ignore that he's a dictator who invades other countries, assassinates the opposition and media, steals from the Russian people, the list goes on.

Keep on trying to make it as if he had no choice. Or that Russia had no choice.

> Russia was on reasonably good terms with Europe for at least 2 decades.

From the dissolution of the USSR until about the NATO-Yugoslav War, which was...a little over half a decade.

> Russia was on reasonably good terms with Europe for at least 2 decades.

Russia has been at war with Europe in Ukraine for 8 years you moron.

Paraphrasing the guidelines:

“Russia has been at war with Europe in Ukraine for 8 years you moron” can be better expressed as simply “Russia has been at war with Europe in Ukraine for 8 years.”

You've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly in your comments, including by calling names, personal attacks, and flamewar. This is not ok, and we ban accounts that do it. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

Being on the right side of a war, or feeling that you are, is not a reason to post like this to HN—it's a reason to err in the opposite direction, as the site guidelines say: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

You've been posting like this on lots of other topics too, and in fact your account's commenting history is so flamewarrish that I think we have to ban this account until we get some indication that you want to use HN as intended. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

> And during that time NATO decided it needed purpose so it decided, among other things, that it needed to destroy Libya.

That happened in 2011. Ukraine and Georgia attempted to join NATO as early as 2008 (and other former Eastern Bloc states did join previously), motivated by (among many other things) Russian interference in Ukraine's 2004 elections and Russia's participation in the Georgian Civil War.

Needless to say, blaming NATO's intervention in Libya for Russian interventionism throughout the multiple decades preceding it is about as bass-ackwards of an understanding of causality as trying to assert that wet sidewalks cause rain to happen.

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