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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

  > NATO was founded to defend against invasion from e.g. Russia

Exactly. Russia views NATO as an anti-Russian entity. And both sides have phrases that amount roughly to "the best defense is an effective offense".

Would you feel threatened if your neighbours set up weapons right outside your property line, ostensibly to defend in case you attack? And especially if they've already invaded your property twice (France and Germany both invaded Russia).

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Russia signed treaty after treaty saying countries can make their own alliances. NATO has not put nukes eastward or any permeant allied presence, other than the armies of the allied states themselves in the region.

Russia refused to withdraw from Moldova to implement CFE II. This is not the action of a state worried that it's disadvantage in conventional arms will lead to invasion.

Ukraine was not a NATO member when Russia attacked it in February 2014, not was there a membership action plan to get Ukraine into NATO.

This has nothing to do with NATO. Only with Russian imperialism.

What weapons? Cold War era stockpiles have been dismantled in Europe and nothing has been installed in countries that have joined since the Cold War.

You act like there aren’t a hundred missiles in Montana trained at russian targets for the past 70 years. Should russia invade montana?

Would you feel threatened if your neighbours set up weapons right outside your property line, ostensibly to defend in case you attack?

Except that never happened in Ukraine, or in any of the other NATO countries close to Russia.

You know that, right?

I'm showing you the Russian perspective. I don't care one way or the other.

Funny, it definitely seemed as if you were presenting it as your own.

That's not the Russian "perspective", that's just a Russian propaganda lie.

The actual Russian perspective is "Let's quickly grab Ukraine before they completely turn towards Europe, otherwise Russia cannot be an empire again."

Bravo sir, this is Alexander cutting the knot of muddled relativism.

It may be strange to modern western minds but Russians still consider their imperial project as wholesome, good and nearly sacred. To get into the correct mindstate, you can read for example how Churchill venerated the British empire. The Russians hold this same veneration to their imperial project today. They also know western audience probably would not appreciate this reasoning so they need to invent laughable excuses like ”we were afraid of NATO expansion” that clueless western commentators happily repeat as the foundational reason.

I guess it’s one way to frame it. The other could be:

Somebody is refusing to pay protection money and is forming a “neighbourhood watch”. We need to make example of them.

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