The "Russia had to attack because of NATO" thing confuses me. Lots of people intelligent enough to e.g. write for Foreign Policy, seem to not be able to give a clear reason for this being the case, but still strongly believe it.

This article links to some NATO official "admitting" this was the case, when actually it seems to be someone pointing out how stupid a reason this is in a second language i.e. "you don't like NATO on your border so you invade a neighbor, which gives all your other neighbors a good reason to join NATO, that's dumb".

But apparently that's the best evidence he has that he was right alone along and it's all NATO's fault.