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jones What you Gurgen or Steak all fail to grasp is how profound and comparably subtle Western influence is globally. Whether it's bombs dropping or drone strikes (reserved for brown and black people), extortionate backdoor diplomacy, funding of opposition be they moderate free market oriented reformers or jihadi rebels, organisational support and schooling of said opposition through the School of the Americas or the NED, covert activity from any of the letter agencies etc - you can't overstate how it's totally impossible for anything resembling normal governance in the countries affected to be achieved. That goes for both Russia and it's small neighbours.
How do you square this with the fact that Eastern Europe are the most vociferous proponents of NATO and the likes of Poland/Baltic states have generally been pressuring Western Europe to step up since 2014? It’s worth pausing for thought that countries that supposedly share “deep cultural ties” and were behind an iron curtain for the most part of the previously century have come to this conclusion. They’re not being led, they’re leading from the front.
You don’t have to tell me that the US led Western order has decimated entire regions to further their objectives but there’s been regions (definitely a smaller list by my count) where those interventions have been brought through by the wishes of the people living there because it gives themselves leverage against regional rivals - this is true of Eastern Europe, for example.
I agree that Russia is weaker than the scare stories make them out to be and certainly hysteria to justify further escalations needs to be neatly separated from the facts. However, in isolation - Russia would have no issues in a 1 v 1 battle against Ukraine or most of Eastern Europe which is what drove most of those countries into NATO in the 90s/early 00s. Also, there’s plenty of historical precedent which even Putin has cited as to why those buffer states should remain in the Russian sphere of influence.
I haven’t called Putin insane/lunatic - he wants to maintain his control of his region. The NATO ex-Warsaw Pact countries don’t want this and will probably repel Russia for the foreseeable future justifying their decision. Ukraine were caught in two minds and will likely be split in two as a result.