RE: mac, you talk like a 1970s trades union leader and no friend to EUA either as Russia harms their fut19 Feb 2022 21:32
As Tim Marshall puts (6 years ago);
"Russia is the biggest country in the world, twice the size of the USA or China, five times the size of the India, seventy five times the size of the UK.. However, it has a relatively small population of about 144 million, fewer people than Nigeria or ****stan.
Then there are the pro-Western countries formerly in the Warsaw Pact but now all NATO and/or the EU: Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, Albania and Romania. By no coincidence, many are among the states which suffered most under Soviet tyranny. Add to these Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova, which would all like to join both organisations but are being held at arm's length because of their geographical proximity to Russia and because all three have Russian troops or pro-Russian militia on their soil. NATO membership of any of these three could spark a war.
All of the above explains why in 2013, as the political battle for the direction of Ukraine heated up, Moscow concentrated hard.
As long as a pro-Russian government held sway in Kiev, the Russians could be confident that its buffer zone would remain intact and guard the North European Plain. Even a studiedly neutral Ukraine, which would promise not to join the EU or NATO and to uphold the lease Russia had on the warm-water port of Sevastopol in Crimea, would be acceptable. That Ukraine was reliant on Russia for energy also made it increasingly neutral stance acceptable, albeit irritating. But a pro-Western Ukraine with ambitions to join the two great Western alliances, and which threw into doubt Russia's access to its Black Sea port? A Ukraine that one day might even host a NATO naval base? That could never stand.
For the Russian foreign policy elite, membership of the EU is simply a stalking horse for membership of NATO, and for Russia, Ukrainian membership of NATO is a red line. Putin piled the pressure on Yanukovych, made him an offer he chose not to refuse, and the Ukrainian president scrambled out of the EU deal and made a pact with Moscow, thus sparking the protests which were eventually to overthrow him."
The author writes more pages on this but I am not going to put everything up on here.
The gist of it is:
Ukraine wants to join NATO.
NATO wants Ukraine.
Russia wants Ukraine because of the above.
You could argue that this current situation is the fault of NATO by not stating to Ukraine that you they can't join because they know of the tensions / instability this will probably cause. However, they haven't and are just adding fuel to the fire IMO.
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