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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

Check out a history book about the lead up to 1939 (including an afterword why Russia doesn’t think 1939 is a special).

The year Germany and their Soviet allies invaded Poland; just another year in the Russian Empire.

And just a year after the Poles and their Nazi allies invaded Czechoslovakia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Czechoslovakia_(...

If we're going to start counting who gave up what to Germany there isn't a country in Europe that didn't make a deal with the devil hoping someone else would be eaten first.

0.64% of Czechoslovak / 0.23% of Polish territory for a year, shame (rightfully) forever.

"You forgot Poland" [1]

Ukraine and Poland both invaded Irak in a recent war of aggression [2, 3].

Have you contemplated the question of helping to bring to trial the Polish leaders that signed off this violation of the international rule-based order?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidentia...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_willing

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_involvement_in_the_2003...

Do you believe there's a real risk of Russia invading and occupying other countries in Europe?

Georgia and Moldova are on the same path as Ukraine, they want to be members of the EU.

All three countries are outside of NATO and EU, so they will have no one daring help them against a Russian invasion.

Putin has shown that he is willing to take on 44 million Ukrainians with the invasion of Ukraine, so it's impossible to know if Georgia and Moldova are also on the list.

Any country not a member of any defense pact are at risk, so membership of the EU is a sound but also dangerous choice.

A regime change in Russia would of course change the dynamics, but that outcome seems highly unlikely.

You are entirely correct, those countries have good reason to fear Russia (with the additional complexity of substantial numbers of ethnic Russians in those countries), but, as I wrote a month ago [1], there is a symmetry here and Russia also has good reason to fear NATO, for the latter, in the last 2 decades, have invaded (directly or through proxy forces): Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan. The sibling post [2] by "chrisco255" summrises some of the arrising issues.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30479658

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30887328

Russia has no reason to fear NATO - it's ridiculous. No one is going to invade the country with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.

Direct invasion isn’t the only existential threat a country can face.

I know the following hypothetical is implausible as a genuine reality, it’s purely for the sake of illustrating the first step of one possible ultra-Hawkish-Russian narrative:

“How screwed is Russia if NATO countries never end the current sanctions, and NATO slowly increases its sphere of influence until Russia was the only one outside it?”

The domino theory led the USA into Vietnam, after all, and Vietnam was never a threat to the USA.

Considering that in preparation for the invasion of Ukraine Putin more or less emptied his NATO borders (Norway, Baltics) of troops, it seems that Putin in reality is not afraid of any NATO invasion. It's just political rhetoric.

The symmetry of NATO being involved in the named countries is hard to view as a threat to Russia.

Yes, those countries are all in Asia, same as Russia, but apart from that it's a really weak argument that Russia should feel threatened.

In no way can the invasion of Ukraine be justified and yet here we are, nobody can tell if Putin wants to invade Georgia or Moldova.

It requires a paranoid person such as Putin, to think NATO has a master plan for attacking Russia.

> nobody can tell if Putin wants to invade Georgia or Moldova.

Actually… Moldavia would be next, no NATO, no EU, Transnitria is already practically under Russian control.

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