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.
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.
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.’”
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.
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?
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.
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)