I should point out that Georgia is geographically not in Europe but in NATO's foyer right now in terms of membership, though that will likely be dropped now that the government has turned pretty definitively towards Russia.

Montenegro and Macedonia aren't afraid of any threats to their sovereignty (unless it's from Greece in the case of Macedonia, which has to have the silly "North" in its official name for that reason alone). They're just interested in EU benefits and were told to join to show solidarity. Montenegro in particular absolutely loves Russians and treats them far better than it treats tourists from EU countries.

If you believe Montenegro or Macedonia is any way nervous about Russia, I have a bridge over the Dniepr to sell you. It's beyond laughable.

There isn't a lot in English about US covert support for Chechen jihadi terrorists, but there were a lot of documents in the Russian-language internet and other indicia, such as the jihadi site kavkaz.org being hosted in and funded from the US. That changed after 9/11 but not before.

As for whether or not Ukraine was a threat to Russia, it's patently obvious that it was. Even without NATO membership, Russia has found a NATO-armed Ukraine to require it to wage a bloody war of attrition that is in its third year. While I don't think Ukraine has another full year of fighting left in it, it may limp along until October or so before you see a collapse along the lines of the 1918 German collapse.

Imagine now for a moment a Ukrainian army that had 10 more years of NATO training and integration, NATO airbases, anti-air defenses, integrated missile attack and defense systems, state of the art drone warfare and anti-drone systems, all right on the Russian border in perfect tank terrain. You're talking about an army that could easily be 500,000 to 750,000 strong.

But don't take my word for it. Take the words of the leading foreign policy experts who warned that NATO expansion into Ukraine would be seen as an existential threat to Russian policymakers. Get rid of Putin, and Russia would still be in Ukraine (maybe even using tactical nuclear weapons if a less humane leader were running Russia).

The same people who are saying Russia is expansionist and dead set on taking back everything east of the Oder are also privately saying that Russia reacted to NATO expansion and is not planning any wars of expansion farther westwards. US policy makers do not believe Putin will attack the Baltics or Poland.

But hey, let's just manipulate those stupid masses into extending US influence, right? I mean, Ukraine's going to win, aren't they? They just need $x billion more and the miracle will happen. In reality, they need about 30,000,000 more people in their country, 3000 more tanks, 5000 more APCs, about 1000 newest generation fighters and bombers with highly trained pilots, a few tactical nuclear weapons and about 5000 more PATRIOT systems, and then maybe they could retake some of their lost territory before being hit with a massive nuclear strike by Russia.

So what is the real endgame? It increasingly looks like it's just about killing the entire Ukrainian population by wiping out its male population. On the good side, it will end that hick dialect of Russian they call the Ukrainian language, but seriously - Ukraine is likely to lose up to 2,000,000 men. Do the math. Population was realistically only 36 million after subtracting people in the Russian controlled areas, over 6 million fled to Europe, some 2-4 million went East to Russia, and they're at 26-28 million people, of which realistically they only have some 6,000,000 that are men of military age (13-14 million men, but a good 25% are too old to fight and 25% are too young). Of those people they need some to keep what is left of the country running and they've charitably lost 750,000 in the war already. They're losing about 50,000 soldiers a month now and sending people with no training to the front 3-4 days after dragging them off the streets.

The Russian FAB-5000s are blowing the crap out of any concentrations of troops, the Kh-101s are blowing up trains with ammo, the hypersonics are hitting airfields, and Ukraine keeps losing everything the West sends, and will soon run out of people.

But NATO said they weren't going to negotiate, so Putin will go forward until the collapse now. Wonderful strategery there, NATO.

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.