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Comment by mathfailure | Hacker News Reader

> "Russia felt threatened"

Are you Russian top military executive or a president of Russia?

No? Then don't speak what Russia did or did not feel.

> No. Nobody wants to invade Russia.

Then don't name Russia as the most probable enemy in your militaristic charts in your military alliance that keeps on expanding beyond reasonable limits.

And don't expand your military alliance that close to Russia's borders.

> The deal since the end of the cold war has been this: Russia can do whatever the hell it likes inside its own borders.

The other side of the deal was NATO not getting any expansions packs. But oh, shoot, it just slipped and happened to expand to... how many countries since Soviet Union got dissolved? ah?

Destroying Soviet Union was not enough for the West and so it wants a piece of Russia now? If you think so - then come and die in Ukraine, you are welcome there.

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Here is Putin 2002:

“I am absolutely convinced that Ukraine will not shy away from the processes of expanding interaction with NATO and the Western allies as a whole. Ukraine has its own relations with NATO; there is the Ukraine-NATO Council. At the end of the day the decision [on Ukraine joining NATO] is to be made by NATO and Ukraine. It is a matter for those two partners.”

Why should nations be beholden to verbal agreements that were never ratified by their elected officials, between parties that didn't exist any more in the case of the Warshaw pact and whose legal successor nation official stated they had no problem with it.

Thats silly.

Should NATO have never had any talks with Russia about a possible NATO membership because of that verbal agreement with the leader of the Warshaw Pact Gorbachev?

That was in 2002, when it looked like after years of cold war U.S. and Russia can finally become good allies. That was before U.S. along with a group of other (mostly NATO) countries invaded Iraq in 2003 without any mandate in U.N. and which Russia has opposed to and before the invasion of Libya in 2011, before U.S. carried out Arab Spring in 2010-2012 and before U.S. carried out colour revolutions, especially Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003 and... Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004.

It is not a secret at all that U.S. carried those out and then it became quite clear that U.S. installs marionette regimes here and there and one of the places was... Ukraine.

Right after all those Russo-American relations going up, up and up merely some years ago.

Russia didn't like being stabbed in the back at all.

You can't really bring non binding, non serious agreements that were never put in writing or ratified and that all parties declared no longer relevant back from the dead and feign moral outrage. That's ridiculous.

What does "legally binding" do good at all? There are no other laws other than the rule of the strength.

U.S. was strong for a long time. It did whatever it liked.

Now Russia restored some of its strength to the point it can show others that sometimes you have to listen to when a bear warns you (quite calmly and nicely first).

For one, if it is ratified in a democratic nation that means that the people had a say in it through their elected representatives.

That way the other party knows that this agreement has some backing and staying power.

Not some dude spouting some ideas to counterparts during very very turbulent times.

Who decides if a nation is democratic or not?

Many people (even Americans) claim U.S. is not a democracy. Every country has corruption to some degree. The only backing and staying power there is - is the force a country has and its willingness to use it to defend something.

Imagine the paradox: holding the fate of the world in your hands, but still feeling under threat from a military alliance like NATO

Easily imaginable: every country with big enough nuclear arsenal could be viewed as a country holding the fate of the world in its hands.

But since there can be multiple such countries at the same time and since no one has stopped developing arms/tech even further - I wouldn't call it a paradox when one nuclear country feels threatened by another group of both nuclear and non-nuclear countries coming closer and closer to its borders.

The difference between a rational person and a narcissist is this: one recognizes the sufficiency of world-destroying power, the other will always demand more, regardless of the absurdity.

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