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Comment by ohgodplsno | Hacker News Reader

>Minsk agreements were basically abandoned from the start

Because Russia broke them on the first week, yes.

>EU ignored Crimea annexation and continued pumping billions of dollars into Russia (you can see these billions now in form of rockets and bombs in Ukraine)

How is that western/NATO aggression ?

>NATO has been expanding to the East and antagonising paranoid Russia.

NATO is not an entity that looks to engulf everything. Countries see themselves next to Russia, see the bullshit that happens when Russia doesn't honor its agreements with the CSTO members (Amernia and Azerbaijain duking it out make everyone realize how much of a joke the CSTO is), and decide to join NATO. There is no "NATO expansion", there is no agreement of not letting new countries join either. Noone is forced at gunpoint to join NATO.

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I think these countries are being forced at gunpoint. The guns are just not held by NATO members.

All these countries applied to NATO, but it was NATO that accepted their application. It could also refuse their application or just tell them they won’t be accepted if they apply, like they did when Russia joined NATO partnership and wanted to become a member. Inserted NATO decided to expand to Russian borders but not accept Russia. Which was logical, what is a purpose of a military alliance without a powerful enemy?

Russia didn't apply to join though, they (Putin) expected special treatment.

    The Labour peer recalled an early meeting with Putin, who became Russian president in 2000.

    “Putin said: ‘When are you going to invite us to join Nato?’ And [Robertson] said: ‘Well, we don’t invite people to join Nato, they apply to join Nato.’

    And he said: ‘Well, we’re not standing in line with a lot of countries that don’t matter.’”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/04/ex-nato-head-s...

> It could also refuse their application or just tell them they won’t be accepted if they apply, like they did when Russia joined NATO partnership and wanted to become a member.

Russia never applied, they wanted to be special and be asked to apply, they where told that they would have to apply like everyone else.

And then never did.

Apparently Russia never formally applied for NATO membership like the other Eastern European countries because "Putin didn't want to wait in line":

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/04/ex-nato-head-s...

This "Russia wanted to join NATO but was denied" argument is the same sort of half-truth revisionism like that "NATO promised to not expand east-ward" thing. What may have been "promised" in private conversations behind closed doors by people who most likely weren't even qualified to give such promises doesn't count much unless there's some sort of written agreement.

There is a formal agreement that Germany doesn't station foreign NATO troops in former East Germany. And guess what? There are no foreign NATO troops stationed in former East Germany to this day.

> All these countries applied to NATO, but it was NATO that accepted their application.

As an eastern european, I hate this rhetoric. Some country feels threatened by Russia, joins NATO, and this is presented as NATO bullying Russia. The country that joined, its citizens and their will is not a subject in this discussion. The country is a thing, discussed like you would discuss a nuclear warhead or military base - it's just a tool the powerful use for their means.

How about you consider what the sovereign people want and stop thinking about them as political playthings.

How is joining a defensive alliance to stop Russia from invading you "bullying Russia"?

Why don't we compare the number of times Russia has recently invaded its neighbors with the number of times NATO has invaded Russia, shall we?

Number of times Russia attacked any NATO state is exactly 0, same as number of times NATO invaded Russia. What’s your point here?

On the other side, why so limited question? Why not comparing the number of times NATO states invaded some country, and compare with the number of times Russia invaded some country. The relation would probably be somewhere between 10:1 and 100:1.

And btw, why do you call NATO a defensive alliance when it wasn’t involved in a defensive war, only in criminal aggression, if we use international law classification.

> Why not comparing the number of times NATO states invaded some country, and compare with the number of times Russia invaded some country. The relation would probably be somewhere between 10:1 and 100:1.

Not even close: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Russia

And the list only contains major armed conflicts, omitting violent crackdowns in occupied territories, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_9_tragedy and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_Events_(Lithuania)

Are you actually citing all the wars Russia was involved in since IX century? I don’t even know where to start with this, but maybe consider that “Russia” is not some thousand year old unchanging state, it has been morphing and changing drastically. Even reasoning about USSR and modern Russia as equivalent entities is just plain wrong - different economies, different basis, different system of government, ownership and decision making, vastly different territories even. So I would stick comparing modern states between each other, not some small feudal entities from IX century

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