I disagree. These plays have been available since the establishment of the nuclear deterrent. The soft-peddling from the US and NATO is indicative of their respect for the deterrent. People calling for NATO to counterattack are delusional. NATO and Russia still benefit from minimizing shared borders, so I don't think Russia will annex Ukraine and instead will leave it demilitarized.
Look I hope you're right. I want to agree with you 100%. But just neutralizing Ukraine I'm not sure what that actually gets him. He could have gotten diplomatic agreements of some fashion to not have Ukraine NATO (and it wasn't seriously on track to join either). Idk. I hope you're right.
Kiev is 529 mi (~10h) from Moscow. If Ukraine were to join NATO, there would be a NATO base inside that range in days. Lockheed Martin claims its Precision Strike Missile has a 310 mile range [1]. I can understand why Putin would want Ukraine to be a friendly puppet or be demilitarized.
Diplomatically, it wouldn't be advisable to give an adversarial foreign power control over the membership of your alliance, so NATO can never give those guarantees. My belief is that Putin only sought those guarantees to fabricate a casus belli.
I think you forgot your own argument. Let me remind you: "If Ukraine were to join NATO, there would be a NATO base inside that range [529 mi] in days."
You are trying to justify Putin's actions by inventing a hypothetical while ignoring the fact that the NATO borders within 500 miles of Moscow is a reality for years.
Sure but the US and NATO had no interest in doing anything like that. Nobody gives a crap about Russia as an enemy except to the extent that they make themselves an enemy.
NATO alliance members have NATO military bases, but you're right that US and NATO have no interest in adding Ukraine as a member. As we are seeing, the country is in a weak geographic position: Russia was able to stage forces to encircle >80% of the country prior to the invasion. Who would want that kind of ally?
Ukraine has warm water ports in the Black sea, huge oil pipeline capacity from Russia, and farmland, all of which are valuable to Russia. I won't claim to understand the reasoning but I believe Russia intends to control all three of those either directly or through a puppet state.
