mopsi

Ukraine was not joining NATO. Nor do foreign policy professionals, both in Russia and abroad, consider NATO a threat to Russia. Nor does the war have anything to do with Barbarossa or many other historical comparisons; Russian propaganda generally avoids drawing comparisons to Barbarossa because Ukraine was at the forefront of the invasion and the historical parallels between the invaders would be too obvious. The sudden and devastating attack and siege of Kyiv in 1941 was a major traumatic early-war event that occupies a similar place in Russian mass consciousness as Pearl Harbor does in American consciousness. Instead, Russian propaganda frames the war as a continuation of a civilizational mission: the reclamation of "historic Russian lands" and the reunification of the Russian people.

This is at odds with the propaganda for foreign audiences that presents the war as a modern conflict with NATO, but thankfully, people like you who talk about listening to Russia don't actually know what's going on there and flat out refuse to listen what Russians are saying.

For instance, the commander of the 2014 invasion of Donbas is a prominent public figure, a mentor and ideologue, who used to host lengthy livestreams in which he discussed how and why the war happened. Have you watched any of his long talks about the restoration of the Russian imperial province of Novorossiya through war against Ukraine, or do you prefer to pretend that none of this exists?

Not to mention the entire pre-Putin generation of Russian politicians and diplomats, who are very active on Twitter and readily explain how NATO is beneficial to Russia by imposing extensive standards on its members along Russia's western border.

Putin's own former senior advisor recently got so pissed about dumbasses placing blame on NATO that he published a video on his personal Youtube channel explaining why the entire narrative a malicious misrepresentation of the facts and bullshit from the start. According to him, Putin held secret staff meetings (which the advisor attended) about the invasion of Ukraine as early as 2005, which predates the common excuses for the war by many years.

But no. Instead of listening to Russians, you just repeat hollow Russian war propaganda that echoes across the internet without any real people behind it, believing that you have some insight that others lack.

What's your beef with Nazis? Don't you enjoy foreign invasions and genocide, bombs falling from the sky as the master race marches forward?

Spreading this expansion narrative is intellectually dishonest. For decades, the power balance has been such that Eastern Europe has sought to join Western cooperation platforms like the EU, against lukewarm reception from existing members.

France was cautious about East Germany joining the EU, fearing economic strain. Germany had reservations about Poland. Poland generally supports Ukraine's membership, but remains concerned about security and migration. And so it goes.

Attempts to depict this as the EU somehow forcing itself eastward are 100% pure bullshit. New members have generally had to fight an uphill battle to gain entry into the union. They are usually poorer, work for lower wages, and undermine the economies of existing members of the common market until economic development levels catch up in a few decades.

  > Our homeland is unassailable by conventional means (especially if we keep our Navy well-funded) and we can also sit behind our nuclear arsenal.

Unless you intend to nuke the White House, the nuclear arsenal remains entirely useless against the political subversion that Russia has very successfully used to destabilize and isolate the US. The official US envoy was recently caught advising Russians on how to manipulate the US president. Who needs tanks and missiles when you have reach like this? Without a single bullet being fired at the US, the sitting president is rolling out red carpets for Putin and praising him as genius while verbally attacking the Canadian prime minister and openly undermining Canada's sovereignty.

  > I would challenge you to do the same. Not once in this discussion have you made any critical analysis of the US's actions, statements, or motivations. NOT. ONCE.

My entire initial reply was a criticism of the US and EU naivety in thinking that buttering the KGB-military circles could lead to long-term positive outcomes, an idea you seemed to share. Overall, when it comes to Russia's relations with its European neighbors, the US is simply not an important factor. It is a question of sovereignty, enlightenment and other European values versus Russian imperialism, which is focused on finding ways to suppress them both at home and abroad. The people of Europe want to mind their own business, but Russia will not leave them alone. For 80 years, the US was a partner in this. Nowadays not so much, but the long-standing confrontation continues nevertheless.

  > ABM sites in Romania could also, forecasting into the future, be home to hypersonic missiles which could engage Russian launch sites with little or no warning and completely destabilize their MAD capability.

Russian ICBMs are primarily in the Urals, Siberia and the Far East, many thousands of kilometers from Romania. Not even hypersonic missiles would pose a threat. The danger from such sites is political in nature: closer US-Romanian defense cooperation directly threatens Russian ambitions in Romania, because the US would then be more likely to assist Romania if it comes under Russian political, economic or military attack.

  > Does the US have legitimate national security concerns? Does Germany have legitimate national security concerns? Does Romania have legitimate national security concerns? Does Russia have legitimate national security concerns?

Yes, yes, yes, yes. But focusing on Russia's overplayed "security concerns," when Russia has been the main aggressor in the region for centuries, is out of balance and unjustified. It is like writing about fire safety by centering the narrative on the inconvenience suffered by the arsonist.

  > Expecting Russia to ever become a "normal European state" is the main mistake. My entire point is to accept that Russia is authoritarian.

This is exactly the mistake that the US and the EU made: treating Russia not as an ordinary European country from which respect for human rights, free elections and other political, social, and economic rights should be expected, but as a special country entitled to do more than others. The KGB-military circles have ruthlessly exploited this naivety to destroy Russian democracy. They are happy to play uncivilized savages if that means that the US and EU give them freer rein to plunder and subjugate their neighbors and beyond.

  > Figure out what the KGB-military elite want, and give it to them in exchange for a shift in their security posture.

In their wildest dreams, they want total world domination, to assume the role of the Third Rome and the shining beacon of the entire humanity. In practical terms, this means Central and Eastern Europe directly incorporated into Russia and the entire Western Europe turned into anti-American pawns, like East Germany was and Belarus currently is. The Middle East would be divided with Iran, and Asia with China, leaving countries like the Philippines and Australia for China to take over, while others like Japan are turned anti-American through subversion. In the US, they want to fuel instability and separatism through ethnic, social and racial conflicts to keep Americans busy with holding their country together while Russia rules the world.

Dugin's "Foundations of Geopolitics" from 1997 sums the Russian attitude very well and much of that has already been put into action: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

In short, they want you dead. They want an endless "Los Angeles '92" across the entire US while the Russian kleptocrats plunder the world. The bare minimum they are openly demanding now with ultimatums like the one presented in 2021 is a return to Europe as it was in 1989, half of Europe victimized, the other half terrified that they will be next.

  > The former Eastern Bloc should have been Finlandized: economic intermediaries between Russia and Western Europe, with just enough domestic military capability to discourage Russian hard power, but no actual US military alliance integration to keep the Russians from getting jittery either.

... because neutrality worked so well in the 1930s, and for Belarus and Ukraine in the present day as well? Neutrality allowed Germany and the USSR to pick off their neighbors one by one without fear of a broader response. It has enabled Russia to do the same in the present era, minimizing the risks it faces when attacking a country. Essentially, it all boils down to the fact that your mental image of Russia is wrong. You believe they are scared of their European neighbors and focus on appeasing Russia by castrating their neighbors, whereas Russia is playing up its security concerns solely to shape the battlefield in its favor for its expansionist ambitions.

  > Then we went and followed that up by announcing we wanted ABM sites on Russia's doorstep to protect Europe from "errant Iranian nuclear missiles" which was obvious bullshit.

The problem that Russians had with the US ABM site in Romania was due to deepening US-Romanian defense cooperation which reduces Russia's opportunities to turn Romania into another puppet state like Belarus at the very least, not because the site posed any danger to Russia. The Romanian ABM site lies on the direct flight path between Iran and large US military bases in Germany and makes perfect sense that the US would want to have an ABM site there. The missiles at the Romanian site are unable to reach Russian missile launching sites, nor are they on their flight path.

Examples like this clearly show that you have been consuming Russian propaganda without pulling out a globe and a measuring tape to check whether there is any actual credibility to the prepackaged narratives.

  > We had a narrow window circa 1999-2007 where we could have integrated an Authoritarian Russia into a security and economic framework that would put China in a vulnerable strategic position.

Says who?

Top Russian diplomats, starting with some of the former foreign ministers themselves, maintain that the disintegration of Russian democracy is the fault of the former KGB and military power structures, which enjoyed privileged positions in the Soviet system. They were sidelined when the USSR fell apart, but by the mid-1990s, had crawled back and consolidated enough power to begin wiping out all other competition, from political parties to the free press.

If any blame lies with external actors, they say, it is for failing to support and pressure Russia enough to develop into a modern European state. Instead, the US and the EU continued to butter the KGB-military faction well into the 2010s, doing their best to ignore war crimes, human rights abuses, attacks on political freedoms, the suppression of political rights, and the outright murder of political opponents.

There was no "narrow window" in 1999-2007. The window for keeping Russia on a path toward becoming a normal European state closed around 1995. 1999 marks the year Putin rose to the highest levels of government, and by that point the outcome was pretty much decided. By spring 2000, Putin had openly raided and taken over NTV, the last major independent television channel in Russia. In 2002, the powers of the security services were expanded and notorious "extremism" laws were adopted, which have been used to suppress everything from opposition parties to NGOs. In 2003, Putin took over oil and gas company Yukos and arrested and imprisoned its owner, the richest man in Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

By the end of 2003, Russia had no independent national media, no effective parliamentary opposition, and instead had laws enabling repression under legal cover and security services embedded in political governance. Property rights, even for the richest and most influential people in the country, had become conditional on loyalty to Putin.

Russian democrats, who had lost their influence by the mid-1990s, could have become partners of the US and EU, but the KGB-military elite - never. Even suggesting this signals an absolute lack of understanding of who they are and where they come from. For them, challenging the US and expanding Russia through coercion and war to the full territorial extent of the former Eastern Bloc is the endgame. They don't give two shits about China. They want a return to the privileged heyday of the KGB-military elites in the 1970s, when Europe was divided by the Iron Curtain and the USSR was believed to be an equal to the US. This is the "normal state of the world" of his youth that Putin desperately wants to return to.

Antagonism toward the US lies at their very core, and no amount of buttering will change that. The possibility of cooperation is merely an illusion they sell you to blind you to the next move they make against you.

Yes, but nukes were removed from Cuba and that was the end of the military confrontation. Conventional weapons like fighter jets, air defense missiles, tanks, etc still remained and were upgraded over time.

Meanwhile, Central and Eastern Europe has seen no deployment of even conventional weapons beyond purely symbolic gestures like a few thousand lightly armed soldiers scattered across a region of more than 100 million people.

If Cuba is the blueprint, then NATO allies could arm Eastern Europe to the teeth.

  > To be fair, in 90s-10s the West invaded multiple Soviet and Russian allies (Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, as an example) using weakness of Russian economy an inability to help the allies at the time.

The NATO intervention in the Yugoslav wars lasted only a few months, killed fewer people than the Serbs executed on some of their most productive single weekends, and brought a definitive end to a decade of civil wars. Please explain how this is negative and what reason Russians have to bitch about it all the time.

If anything, the intervention should have taken place far sooner. Many, many civilian lives could have been saved while NATO allies spent years merely watching people in Europe being murdered for their ethnic background.

  >  USSR withdrew from Eastern Germany in the end of 80s as a gesture of good will in hope to improve the relations, but it was never reciprocated.

Gesture of goodwill, gimme a break. The USSR ran out of money and ceased to exist entirely (1991) before the last Soviet forces left Germany (1994).

... cared only about the nukes. Conventional weapons remained in Cuba, and the USSR continued supplying them until the end in 1991. In 1978, for example, the USSR gave Cuba the newest MIG-27 fighter jets, and the United States did nothing about it, which proves the opposite of what Kremlin trolls are trying to argue.

The USSR's support for Cuba went far beyond anything any NATO member has seen since the end of the Cold War, yet there was no war against Cuba.

> Ukrainian soldiers wouldn’t serve Russia

Nobody's going to ask them. Since 2022, Russia has forcibly conscripted 300 000 men from the occupied parts of Ukraine. https://www.euronews.com/2025/11/07/moscow-inches-closer-to-...

  > Whatever social niceties you have are thanks to somebody else protecting you and subsidizing your protection.

Now more than ever, seems like it was just smoke and mirrors all along.

Same. Most people identify a blob of color far earlier than they distinguish one monochrome shape from another.

Why don't they just ask AI to implement it?

Speaking of things people pretend not to exist, Russian historiography frames WWII as lasting from 1941 to 1945. The USSR conspired with the Nazis to divide Europe[1], invaded Poland from the east in cooperation with Germany[2], held a joint victory parade when Soviet and German forces met[3], murdered the Polish people in an industrial manner[4], and so forth. Later, it pretended that the war began only in 1941 and that none of this had happened. These events were officially acknowledged only in the early 1990s, in the final days of the USSR.

And these were only the opening months of the war. Here is Soviet officer Leonid Rabichev giving a chilling description of the final months of the war in Prussia and the extent of Soviet atrocities against civilians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ywe5pFT928

Stories like these are why the phrase "Soviet liberators" is used only sarcastically in Eastern Europe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...

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

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_military...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre

The USSR was also exporting grains as their own people were starving.

Churchill said that the Indian famines were the fault of Indians for "breeding like rabbits" and Stalin said that the Holodomor was the fault of Ukrainians for being "kulak saboteurs". The same dismissive and inhumane attitude shines through. They knew what was happening, they knew that they had the means to stop it, and they chose not to use them.

... until the extended-range version is ordered and no one remembers to fix the leak. :]

The USSR had starved millions of Ukrainians to death before the Nazis even rose to power. Mirrors the British hunger games in India.

If you want to excuse and trivialize the suffering caused by Russians in Eastern Europe, then by the same token you trivialize the suffering of Indians under British rule. All the same excuses apply: some Bandera-Ramachandran surely conspired against the British and therefore the Bengal famine is your own fault.

In Eastern Europe, the USSR acted like the British in India, and Russia continues that tradition.

The other day I saw Judge Napolitano calling for Hegseth to be prosecuted as a war criminal for ordering a second strike on the survivors of a boat strike. This happened on Newsmax, which is ultra partisan and very pro-Trump. And even they are not always following the party line.

Nothing of this sort happens in Russia anymore. The Kremlin has full editorial control over all media outlets. What they want published gets published; what they want suppressed does not. That's it.

If you can find a single instance of the Russian minister of defence being accused of war crimes in the Russian media, then we can discuss further how the two countries compare. Until then, even the US corpo-infested media landscape remains leagues above Russia's.

Putin's approval rating is genuinely that high, around 80%. Nobody cares about opposing candidates, because Russia has had one or two free elections in its entire history. Far more important is that Putin has flooded the lower classes with money. People who were used to surviving on a few hundred dollars a month are now receiving tens of thousands in sign-up bonuses alone, plus military wages and compensations. Absolutely life-changing money for them. It is comparable to flooding a troubled area like West Virginia with military sign-up bonuses ranging from hundreds of thousands to a million per enlistment, with additional money flowing into communities from injury and death compensations.

  > This is standard European censorship of Russian media and news.

There is not a single media outlet left in Russia anymore. The media crackdown is complete. They are all government propaganda now, repeating the same narratives dictated by the Kremlin and free only to choose the wording. They deserve to be removed from the market the same way a box of cereal is pulled when ingredients do not match the printing on the box.

The idea of an invasion of Russia from Europe is utter nonsense and completely detached from reality. Tell it to Russian military experts and you will get sighs and eyerolls in response. Not even Russian military exercises like Zapad simulate such a scenario. On the ground, the border remains completely open - you can walk straight into Russia (and lost mushroomers often do so by accident) because there isn't even a chainlink fence or a cleared sand strip marking the border.

Contrast that with the European countries that actually fear an invasion: they are preparing bridges for demolition, scouting suitable areas for minefields, digging anti-tank ditches, installing reinforced pillboxes and bunkers. Last week, Latvian media reported that the government is even considering tearing up railways near the Russian border to slow the invading force.

The scenarios the Russians are preparing for include, for example, mass unrest in Belarus that would lead to Russia invading the country to keep its dictator in place, like they did in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and in Hungary in 1956. In 2020, this almost happened in Belarus over fraudulent elections and mass protests that were ultimately suppressed without requiring a "brotherly military intervention" by Russia.

There's a huge problem with this narrative. The Russian government's public tender database shows that they ordered the production of campaign medals for the invasion of Crimea months before any of this happened. Oops.

That is indeed the case. It becomes very obvious with lesser-known vendor-specific scripting languages that don't have much training data available. LLMs try to map them onto the training data they do have and start hallucinating functions and other language constructs that exist in other languages.

When I tried to use LLMs to create Zabbix templates to monitor network devices, LLMs were utterly useless and made things up all the time. The illusion of thinking lasts only as long as you stay on the happy path of major languages like C, JS or Python.

  >  Imagine Russia decided to form a military alliance with Mexico with the expected intention of deploying weapons on the Mexican border.

It would be a very foolish idea, because it's no longer the Napoleonic era. Concentrating your forces close to adversary's border makes them easy targets for destruction by long-range artillery and airstrikes. The Finnish chief of defence forces recently made the same remark when the Russians moved their weapons closer to Finland for intimidation: "It only makes them easier for us to destroy."

  > In fact this is, more or less, what the Cuban Missile Crisis was

Not at all. The Cuban missile crisis was only about nuclear missiles. The USSR continued to provide a large number of conventional weapons to Cuba, including submarines and fighter jets, until it collapsed in 1991, without any of your invasion fantasies coming true.

See this photo: https://www.jetphotos.com/photo/11312641

It is a Soviet-built MIG-23 fighter jet carrying Cuban insignia. MIG-23 first flew 5 years after the missile crisis and the first batch was delivered to Cuba in 1978.

  > When was this law enacted?

Many decades ago. Finland now serves as a blueprint for civil defense. Estonia and Latvia have begun to introduce similar provisions, and Norway announced restoration of theirs that were abolished in 1998.

Shelters are only a small fraction of the overall picture. Swedish experts, for example, are discussing developing their own nuclear weapons to increase deterrence against Russia: https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/sweden-nuclear...

  >  Its not possible anymore for one country to just occupy another, mainly because more territory doesnt mean more economic growth or gain, and mainly because its impossible to rule over another peoples in the modern age, as opposed to in the past. 

The USSR was perfectly willing to trade economic development for imperialism. The methods they used to keep the Eastern Bloc under control are also well known. Are you not aware of the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the Prague spring of 1968, the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981, and other key events? Driving a tank over dissenters or ordering soldiers to beat their skulls open with sapper shovels is a surprisingly effective way of crushing opposition. That remains true in 2025, as we can see on the news.

  > In all reality, if Russia invades Finland, that would be the biggest blunder for Russian politics because in a matter of seconds NATO would occupy Moscow.

The same was said about Ukraine, and yet here we are, about to enter the fifth year of the war.

I see no reason to believe that an attack on other European countries besides Ukraine would lead to a much different reaction. Revelations about the Biden administration have shown that Biden knowingly limited Ukraine's capabilities precisely when the Kharkiv offensive was achieving its greatest successes because he got scared by Russian threats to retaliate with nuclear weapons. What makes Finland or Latvia or Poland so exceptional that it would suddenly make allies stop fearing Russian nukes?

  > But in all reality there's 0% chance of Russia invading Finland unprovoked, mainly because we western europeans consider Finland to be part of us, part of the EU, unlike Ukraine which we consider to be a part of the Russian sphere of influence

This is just your bias talking. Finns are proper Europeans for you, while Ukrainians are some half-slaves of Russia. For Putin's generation, the us-versus-them border runs considerably further west from yours, somewhere along the furthest extent of imperial Russia and the USSR and its satellites. The Russian viewpoint is very well summarized in the 1997 "Foundations of Geopolitics" by hardcore Russian Nazi Alexander Dugin and much of what he wrote there has been put into action since the book was published: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics#In_...

  > Germany was demilitarized until a few years ago, as part of post WW2 rules.

Not true at all. West Germany had 5000 tanks in the 1980s. As a general rule, European countries have lost about 80-90% of the equipment and manpower that they had during the Cold War.

  > In addition, tanks are not important for european warfare anymore, because most of the warfare NATO was waging was overseas. Most of the combat strategy has changed to involve combat aircraft and rockets, which NATO excels at.

Other areas are just as lacking. Germany has only about 30 operational fighter jets, artillery rounds for only a few days at the intensity seen in the war in Ukraine, and so on. Germany has a scandal about the poor state of the Bundeswehr every time its inspector-general issues a report.

**

With outlandish ideas about "Moscow being occupied within seconds", it seems like you're living in another era of the distant past. It is a luxury that defense and intelligence chiefs cannot afford, which is why your assessments diverge from theirs. By focusing on economics, you clearly fail to recognize that Russians are driven by an entirely different set of factors. By overestimating European military strength, you severely underestimate how far a broader Russian attack could penetrate.

  > The military and intelligence chiefs of all these countries will of course act this way, the other side of the answer for this question is "No worries, Russia's not a threat, we'll keep everything as is". Imagine if a military general from Poland or Finland answers this, he'll lose his job immediately.

Why? The public and other government institutions would much prefer to hear that there is no threat from Russia, and that we do not need to pull productive members of society away from their work and studies to serve as conscripts. Finnish law requires all apartment buildings to provide proper shelters, which adds about 2% to construction costs. Don't you think real estate developers and buyers would be very glad to eliminate this expense? If Russia is not a threat, then this is just a waste of resources.

But your argument is a tough sell when major Russian exercises simulate naval and airborne landings into Finland and missile strikes against Finnish cities. Combined with extreme rhetoric from Russian state media, which regularly questions Finland's right to exist, accuses it of being a Russophobic Nazi state, and portrays it as a "dangerous breakaway" instead of a legitimate independent nation, there is little room to underestimate the seriousness of the threat. This is the same rhetoric Russia has used against Ukraine, and we can all see how far they are willing to take it. Many dismissed the rhetoric as empty posturing until missiles started raining down.

  >  Russia can't even occupy Ukraine, a country with the lowest GDP per capita in europe, with one of the highest corruption indexes, let alone imagine occupying parts of Europe, say Poland, or the Baltics.

GDP per capita doesn't fight.

Ukraine had vast Soviet stockpiles that had not been scrapped. For example, independent counting has recorded at least 1330 visually confirmed Ukrainian tank losses. Compare that with Germany, which has twice the population and is far wealthier: as of 2022, the entire German fleet consisted of only ~200 operational tanks.

How many other countries in Europe can afford to lose 1330 tanks and still keep fighting? Who even has 1330 operational tanks to begin with? No one. Even major countries like the UK and France have only 160 and 220 tanks, respectively. These small numbers are not enough to stop the kind of onslaught Ukraine is experiencing, which is why European military leaders are rightfully so concerned.

  > There is absolutely 0% chance or even any rational thought or discussion that has happened by the leadership in Russia on this topic.

All military and intelligence chiefs of the European nations that share a border with Russia disagree with that and warn that their societies must be prepared for an invasion within 2 to 5 years after the war in Ukraine ends. What you call "outlandish sensational claims" by "primary school children" is something they take very seriously and it has fundamentally reshaped their approach to defense policy. Sweden, most notably, abandoned 200 years of neutrality, joined NATO, and began hardening its vulnerable points, such as the island of Gotland, which was demilitarized in 2005. Now Sweden has re-established a military presence on the island, brought back heavy weaponry, and is building up a defensive force. Why does an island in the middle of the Baltic sea need tanks, air defense systems and fighter jets on high alert?

Finland, known for its progressive policies, left the Ottawa treaty that banned anti-personnel mines. Why do you think they did that? Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are building bunkers and digging defensive lines on their border with Russia. Latvian news reported just today that the government is considering dismantling rail tracks connecting to Russia to make them unavailable to invading force. Not to mention Poland's buying spree: Poland is acquiring hundreds of rocket artillery systems and a thousand tanks.

Are they all foolish children who don't know what they are doing? The looming threat of a Russian invasion is the sole reason Northern and Eastern Europe maintain militaries at all. There is no other threat in the region. Their militaries could be disbanded overnight if Russia were to vanish into thin air.

  > Cuba and Russia were never in a FORMAL military alliance or pact, since that would've provoked an immediate US invasion.

It doesn't change the fact that in practical terms, the military cooperation between Cuba and the USSR was much deeper than the relationship post–Cold War NATO members have had with the older members. The newer NATO members have received only a promise of assistance in the event of an invasion. Cuba received actual tanks, submarines and fighter jets.

  > ... from a small prize from a Russian internet forum.

The Valdai forum[1] is not "a small internet forum" but the most prominent event run by the Russian government to bring Western politicians, scholars and other notable figures to Russia, treat them like royalty, surround them with agents of influence, and manipulate them into adopting Russian propaganda narratives, which they then repeat in their essays and articles once they return home.

No meaningful discussion takes place there. You can assume that all organizers and domestic attendees are acting under FSB instructions. It is solely an operation by the security services to manipulate Western visitors and turn them into useful idiots. Thus, at least in Eastern Europe, where these tricks are well understood, anyone attending such events is automatically considered suspicious: they must be either utterly clueless or working for Russia. Mearsheimer, somehow, has fallen even deeper and started accepting money.

And it shows. You can look up on YouTube his attempt to debate the Polish foreign minister, completely misrepresenting certain diplomatic events, unaware that Sikorski had been there in person, leading an official delegation. How anyone can take such a buffoon seriously remains a mystery to me. To Russians, he has been one of their best investments. Tens of millions of people have been exposed, through him, to the ideas instilled in him at places like Valdai, believing them to be high-quality expertise from a reputable scholar, when in reality they are nothing more than laundered propaganda.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valdai_Discussion_Club

  > My argument is that Russia was compelled to attack both Georgia and Ukraine because of NATO expansion, or rather preventing NATO expansion, not because of "Putin is crazy, wants to be a Tsar".

This fails to explain why Russia attacked both countries after NATO had decided not to offer them a path to membership.

Putin's intense hostility toward NATO stems from the fact that NATO stands in the way of invading Europe. The blitzkrieg against Ukraine also failed largely because of military support from European NATO members, who used established NATO communication channels to coordinate their efforts - exactly the thing NATO was established for!

If Russia were a normal European country, it would have nothing to lose and much to gain from bordering NATO. NATO membership comes with oversight and separation requirements that make member states stable and predictable. A former, pre-Putin foreign minister of Russia described this as "free-of-charge security on Russia's western border".

It is a problem for Putin only because he seeks to invade Europe; NATO stands in the way.

  > Your argument is that Russia wants to occupy territory just for the sake of expanding Russia, which is really not logical or reasonable.

It is perfectly reasonable when you look at who holds power in Russia: the old revanchist KGB clan seeking to restore the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. This is the world they grew up in and were indoctrinated into in KGB schools. For them, it is a "normalcy" to which they must return.

  > My argument is that if Mexico or Canada joined a military pact with Russia, the US would invade those countries immediately.

There is no need for guessing games when Cuba was actually in a military pact with the USSR until 1991 and hosted jets, bombers, missile cruisers and other conventional weapons for decades after the missile crisis. You can read about Soviet warships conducting missile drills off the coast of Florida in old newspapers. This is far more than anyone has done for countries that have joined NATO since the end of the Cold War. And yet, the US did not invade Cuba.

  > Your argument is that any country can join a mutually defence pact without any consequences, as should be the case for Ukraine.

Russia has repeatedly, in writing, pledged to respect the sovereignty of other European countries, including Ukraine, and their freedom to join military alliances. There's nothing to discuss - unless you want to turn Europe into a landscape of semi-sovereign nations ruled by Russia, which raises the question: why should Russia, in particular, be the European master race? Shouldn't the Franco-German alliance, with its much larger economy, bigger population, and numerous allies, instead dictate what Russia can and cannot do?