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| If the Cold War was truly over when the wall fell, we'd have welcomed Russia into NATO.

This was offered by NATO: Partnership for Peace, NATO-Russia Founding Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93NATO_relations It's Russia that wasn't interested.

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When one of the parties of a "war" elects not to leave that "war", can you argue the "war" ever truly ended, even if one side sent an olive branch?

Absolutely. Most Western leaders (though not all) deluded themselves thinking Russia wanted better relations and that all the problems were somehow the fault of the West. Countless confidence-building measures were taken. Most Western countries reduced defense budgets. Russian leaders, ridiculously claiming that they were threatened by NATO, were dishonest the whole time. As the USSR collapsed, Russia surrounded itself with, and fueled, many "frozen" conflicts: Transnistria in Moldova, Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, Nagorno Karabakh in Azerbaijan, Japanese Islands. Gestures of goodwill, escalation management, appeals to political solutions were seen as weakness by Russia. Putin attacked Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 not because he felt threatened in any way, but to the contrary because he thought that no one would do anything about it.

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