Though not only Poland and the Baltics - see for instance the attached old article about various Eastern European countries' thinking on NATO back in 1995 and how the First Chechen war influenced that. To be honest, I wasn't aware that NATO membership was ever even discussed with any Caucasian or Central-Asian countries other than Georgia. Apart from a small part of Kazakhstan, the Central-Asian countries aren't even in Europe and my understanding is that no non-European country is even able to join under the current rules, whether they've asked for it or not.

So looking at the countries that actually have joined NATO, the former Warsaw Pact and Yugoslav countries, most recently Montenegro, North Macedonia and then after the war started Finland and Sweden, I still figure it's been more a question of NATO letting them in because they really wanted to join, than NATO actively trying to recruit them in some kind of complot against Russia. And the reasons for wanting to join were generally some combination of the symbolic importance of joining 'the West' (many joined roughly around the same time that they joined the EU) and wanting protection from Russia.

I looked up what you said regarding Western support for Chechnya or other Russian separatists, can't say I'm finding much. One political Chechen leader was allowed to visit the US and had some meetings with members of Congress there, there was some money going to humanitarian support during the worst parts of the second Chechen war, yes, but that's about as far as it went, as far as I can see. Enough to irritate Russia, of course, but not by any measure an actual threat to its territorial integrity. It seems that John McCain may have made a remark about considering to declare support for Chechnyan independence at one point in 2008, which no doubt you think is horrible, but that wasn't official policy of his campaign, never mind any actual US government.

Obviously I don't agree to dismiss the color revolutions as 'coups'. There's no doubt that the US/EU/NATO supported Saakashvili and Yushchenko, but then they were the legitimate election winners who were being cheated by attempts from the sitting government to falsify the results. In the case of Ukraine, there was the additional problem of the radically different preferences of the west and east of the country - but that didn't stop Yanukovych from legitimately winning the later 2010 election, so it wasn't impossible for the pro-Russian side to win while playing fair.

The question of to what extent Russia is the successor state of the Soviet Union and can/should get the credit and the blame for its achievements and its crimes is a pretty complicated one. As usual with nationalists, the Putin regime and its defenders seem happy to claim credit for the achievements while refusing blame for the crimes, but obviously that's not a credible position to take. But yeah, it's too easy for the other former Soviet republics to simply blame Russia for everything. I'll take you at your word about the absurd anti-Russian propaganda from the Ukrainian nationalists in the 90s - certainly some of their decisions against the pro-Russian Ukrainians in more recent times, which I'm more familiar with, have been extreme enough.

But for all that, while those extreme Ukrainian nationalists were clearly a threat to the civil and cultural rights of the pro-Russian Ukrainians, they still weren't a threat to Russia itself.

Still not a coup. Other than that, you're right that Yushchenko and other pro-Western Ukrainian leaders in the 2004-2014 period were aspiring to NATO membership despite that position clearly lacking majority support in public opinion - at one point it seems a referendum was considered, which they presumably would've lost. But then, they didn't come anywhere near actually achieving said membership.

After 2014 that indeed changed, unsurprisingly, and after 2022 even more unsurprisingly it changed even more. Because of Russia turning its neighbours' fears into reality.

I refer again to the linked article from 1995 about the impact of the First Chechen war on the thinking of the East European countries. Though ok at that point indeed those fears were more based on historical trauma and unfairly holding Russia solely responsible for Soviet crimes, than on anything the new Russia had done.

But until 2014, no. Russia still invaded Georgia in 2008 and of course you'll say 'but they didn't initiate that conflict', but they absolutely did allow the South Ossetians to provoke Georgia and give them an excuse for jumping in - and they planned it all in advance so that the conflict would happen at a moment that suited Russia and they could have plenty of boots on the ground overnight. And while I'm not saying Georgia did nothing wrong in South Ossetia, suffice to say they didn't do anything remotely in the ballpark of what Russia did against its own separatists in Chechnya.

Russia seems to think that it can have it both ways, mercilessly crushing any separatism within its own borders and making a huge fuss whenever any foreign country dares to criticize them for that, but at the same time happy to support separatists, whether Russian-speaking or otherwise, in the neighbouring countries.

Saakashvili and Yushchenko at least were legitimately elected - the Kyrgyzstan case seems a bit murkier and I've already spent enough time googling stuff so I'll withhold comment on that. Even if the support of the West was needed to overcome the preceding regime's attempts to corruptly hold on to power, it was still the Georgian and Ukrainian peoples who brought the new leaders to power. And as I've mentioned above, Yanukovych managed to win fairly on his next attempt in 2010.

I'm seeing a pattern here incidentally where you are quite interested in public opinion as long as it's in the same direction as yours, like Ukrainian public opinion about NATO before 2014, but the instant that it differs from yours, suddenly those same peoples have no opinions or no agency of their own anymore, then it's all 'the West' this and 'the West' that and every lost election is a 'coup'.

Russian 'peacekeepers' did it all by themselves, huh? The invading Russian armies had nothing to do with it? Anyway, see above.



See above, this post is already long enough.

I don't see Ukraine ever winning this war on the conditions it wants, either. But then, neither does it look like Russia is able to win dramatically more territory than it holds now. So I do also think that a partition of Ukraine is inevitable sooner or later, which in any case is not such a bad outcome based on what the locals involved actually want. Most Russian-held territory was already strongly pro-Russian before the war and is inevitably a lot more so still today, so even if somehow Ukraine could magically win the war and reconquer its entire territory, it would de facto be a hostile occupying force in the Crimea and Donbas and the conflict would still carry on at a lower level of intensity. What I'm less clear on, is whether the Western leaders are clear on this point but choose not to say so for political reasons, or if they are actually serious about supporting Ukraine's war goals.