Let's see if the pro-Putin crowd still try to claim that the 14,000 deaths from 2014 until 2022 were all ethnic Russians being cleansed by Ukraine now that we have yet more people who were involved openly admitting it was Russia vs Ukraine even back then, and that this is an incredibly small number, albeit still tragic, of casualties for a police action let alone a supposed genocide.
I've never understood that talking point because it was such obviously nonsense.
No one was reporting that the 14,000 were all on one side.
No one.
But pro-Putin babblers kept repeating it and even
pointing to the sources that contradicted them.
Just not serious people.
I don't know why people still think Ukraine was somehow a lynchpin to a NATO invasion. The biggest threat to Russia vis à vis NATO wasn't Ukraine, it was Finland.
Ukraine joining the EU, fixing some of its corruption issues, and basically getting a better standard of living by not sticking with Russia was the threat. As you say, from a military point of view, Finland was the bigger NATO issue.
Look, it is silly to pretend that NATO enlargement and what it meant about Russia's declining power wasn't a factor in why Russia acts the way it does.
But that was a cultural issue more than a military one. (All those former subjects desperate to flee join up with NATO. The inability for Russia to just stamp its foot and prevent it happening. Etc.)
It isn't like if that group was explicitly rejected by NATO and formed its own central european defense alliance that Russia would have been fine with it.
IR is full of complicated issues with multiple signals affecting one another.
But "This is all due to NATO and nothing else" is childish nonsense.
globalnews.ca
