If NATO had not tried to expand into Ukraine, Ukraine could have kept Crimea. There was no way a powerful state like Russia would allow itself to be militarily boxed in and essentially zoned out of the Black Sea by having NATO come and take over Crimea and build its military bases there. Before Ukraine’s government was overthrown in a US orchestrated fascist coup Russia was leasing the naval base at Sevastopol. Ukraine profited from this lucrative arrangement, and only a NATO puppet regime in Kiev would do something so detrimental to the people of Ukraine as to provoke a Russian intervention by threatening to give the Crimean base to NATO.
Russia has been pursuing territorial expansion into the Crimea peninsula since prior to the formation of the Russian federation.
I don’t mean to be rude but this is one of the stupidest things i have ever read on this platform. The Crimean peninsula was under the USSR prior to the formation of the Russian Federation. It was transferred to the Ukrainian SSR (not independent Ukraine) in the 1950s for internal administrative reasons, but Moscow still had the final say. The USSR wanting to reorganize its internal borders again is not “territorial expansion”.
Why should the internal borders of the USSR at some arbitrary point in time be forever set in stone as the borders of sovereign states? Why not the borders of the Soviet Republics in 1922 for instance when the whole Transcaucasus was under one SFSR? Or 1945 when Ukraine SSR did not include Crimea? Crimea was and is a majority Russian speaking territory. Hardly any Ukrainian speakers lived there at any point in time. Turkey has more historical claim on Crimea than Ukraine does.
It wasn’t until the orange revolution in 2004 that NATO and Russian relations diverged.
Russia had been protesting NATO expansion ever since NATO took the Baltic states and turned them into anti-Russia military outposts. They protested the second round of NATO expansion as well and warned that if this aggressive behavior continued it would lead to conflict. Russia signed various treaties with NATO because they still hoped that the West would stop seeing them as an enemy and integrate them into their system. The Western orchestrated color revolution in 2004 is not what permanently soured Russia NATO relations, it was the 2008 Bucharest conference where NATO declared intentions to expand into Georgia and Ukraine.
Russia warned again and again that such an expansion would be a red line as such an encirclement constitutes an existential threat to the survival of the Russian state.
alluding that NATO expansion is solely responsible for the conflict is pretty reductive
Indeed, that would be reductive. Which is why we also point to the civil war that had been ongoing in Ukraine since 2014, the refusal of Kiev and the West to adhere to the Minsk agreements, the constant bombing of civilians in the Donbass, the preparation of ethnic cleansing of Russians by the Nazi regime in Kiev, the refusal of the US in 2021 to even consider Russian proposals for a new security architecture in Europe that would take into account Russia’s security priorities, and even the utterly insane announcement by Zelensky in the same year at the NATO summit of intentions to acquire nuclear weapons to which none of the Western leaders gave any pushback.
At every turn it has been made clear to Russia that NATO has hostile intentions toward it and that Ukraine post 2014 has been transformed into an instrument by which these would be carried out.
A socialist nation would not and could not have acted any differently than Russia did. In fact had Russia been socialist they would have already militarily intervened to stop the Nazi coup in 2014. Capitalist Russia waited too long. The USSR when it was faced with the buildup of an existential threat on its Western border acted proactively to bolster its defense by seizing buffer zones like Bessarabia, the Karelian isthmus, the Baltics and West Ukraine/Belarus thereby denying the Nazi imperialists those territories.
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If NATO had not tried to expand into Ukraine, Ukraine could have kept Crimea. There was no way a powerful state like Russia would allow itself to be militarily boxed in and essentially zoned out of the Black Sea by having NATO come and take over Crimea and build its military bases there. Before Ukraine’s government was overthrown in a US orchestrated fascist coup Russia was leasing the naval base at Sevastopol. Ukraine profited from this lucrative arrangement, and only a NATO puppet regime in Kiev would do something so detrimental to the people of Ukraine as to provoke a Russian intervention by threatening to give the Crimean base to NATO.
I don’t mean to be rude but this is one of the stupidest things i have ever read on this platform. The Crimean peninsula was under the USSR prior to the formation of the Russian Federation. It was transferred to the Ukrainian SSR (not independent Ukraine) in the 1950s for internal administrative reasons, but Moscow still had the final say. The USSR wanting to reorganize its internal borders again is not “territorial expansion”.
Why should the internal borders of the USSR at some arbitrary point in time be forever set in stone as the borders of sovereign states? Why not the borders of the Soviet Republics in 1922 for instance when the whole Transcaucasus was under one SFSR? Or 1945 when Ukraine SSR did not include Crimea? Crimea was and is a majority Russian speaking territory. Hardly any Ukrainian speakers lived there at any point in time. Turkey has more historical claim on Crimea than Ukraine does.
Russia had been protesting NATO expansion ever since NATO took the Baltic states and turned them into anti-Russia military outposts. They protested the second round of NATO expansion as well and warned that if this aggressive behavior continued it would lead to conflict. Russia signed various treaties with NATO because they still hoped that the West would stop seeing them as an enemy and integrate them into their system. The Western orchestrated color revolution in 2004 is not what permanently soured Russia NATO relations, it was the 2008 Bucharest conference where NATO declared intentions to expand into Georgia and Ukraine.
Russia warned again and again that such an expansion would be a red line as such an encirclement constitutes an existential threat to the survival of the Russian state.
Indeed, that would be reductive. Which is why we also point to the civil war that had been ongoing in Ukraine since 2014, the refusal of Kiev and the West to adhere to the Minsk agreements, the constant bombing of civilians in the Donbass, the preparation of ethnic cleansing of Russians by the Nazi regime in Kiev, the refusal of the US in 2021 to even consider Russian proposals for a new security architecture in Europe that would take into account Russia’s security priorities, and even the utterly insane announcement by Zelensky in the same year at the NATO summit of intentions to acquire nuclear weapons to which none of the Western leaders gave any pushback.
At every turn it has been made clear to Russia that NATO has hostile intentions toward it and that Ukraine post 2014 has been transformed into an instrument by which these would be carried out.
A socialist nation would not and could not have acted any differently than Russia did. In fact had Russia been socialist they would have already militarily intervened to stop the Nazi coup in 2014. Capitalist Russia waited too long. The USSR when it was faced with the buildup of an existential threat on its Western border acted proactively to bolster its defense by seizing buffer zones like Bessarabia, the Karelian isthmus, the Baltics and West Ukraine/Belarus thereby denying the Nazi imperialists those territories.
Complex analysis aside, if NATO, (more specifically the US) backs a country, then that’s already enough cause for skepticism.