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Comment by prostoalex | Hacker News Reader

> forcing the remaining Ukraine in negotiations to become a "neutral" state located between Russia and NATO/EU

This keeps coming up as if Ukraine's acceptance into NATO was imminent any day now. Realistically NATO membership Ukraine was decades away, if ever.

It's a convenient pretext pitched mainly by Russian media, which needed to frame the sense of urgency, but the real reason must be elsewhere.

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Hypothetically if you were Putin and that was the actual reason, wouldn't you want to deal with it asap when it's still years or decades away, rather than wait until it's close enough that your invasion might lead to them quickly signing it and then sending in Nato forces? Not to mention the fact that he might not trust reports of how far away it is and think it's happening sneakily behind his back soon?

I've no idea what Putin's motives are, but I don't think the fact that Ukraine joining Nato wasn't weeks away from happening prevents it from being as likely a reason as if it was that imminent.

Russia's demography is declining, and global warming will thaw the permafrost and annihilate a ton of infrastructure in the East. Oil prices are high right now, but European reliance on Russian oil is probably at the highest it will ever be. Putin is not getting younger, and he probably wants to finish the long work of integrating Ukraine into his governance system before he dies. The Russian army, as the last three days have shown, is strong, but not getting stronger with every passing day. It's probably way past its prime.

Even though what Putin hated was not the risk of Ukraine joining NATO, but merely Ukraine saying it wanted to join NATO, on the Russian side, it might have been now or never for Putin.

Russians fear that NATO will join Ukraine.

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