A caveat concerning my position: The Rubicon (or RubiDon would be more apt) has been crossed by Russia. Nobody in charge is actually interested in rehashing the morality of any recent past. A new cold war is on, and all of this will disappear in the annals of history. Only internet denizens like us do for our own edification, so please don't take what I write here with much passion.

> Are you referring to the period between the Budapest Memorandum[0] in 1994 and the Russo-Georgian War[1] in 2008?

No, the Munich European Security Conference a year earlier in 2007 during a very public speech in front of the assembly [0]. I suggest watching it in full rather than just reading the wiki.

I believe the Russio-Georgian war is a consequence of that. See "Relations between Georgia and the West" section in the wiki same page you linked to :

- "During the NATO summit in Bucharest in April 2008, [...] George W. Bush campaigned for offering a Membership Action Plan (MAP) to Georgia and Ukraine. Germany and France said that offering a MAP to Ukraine and Georgia would be "an unnecessary offence" for Russia. [...]"

Then further on:

- "[...] on 4 April, Putin said that NATO's enlargement towards Russia "would be taken in Russia as a direct threat to the security of our country". [...] Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Yuri Baluyevsky said on 11 April that Russia would carry out "steps of a different nature" [...] a military action was planned and explicit orders were issued in advance before August 2008. Russia aimed to stop Georgia's accession to NATO."

As such, I believe the current Ukraine war is only a complete repeat of what the Russo-Georgian war was then, only on a grander scale.

Indeed, to counter NATO moves ever since 2007, Russia has been using a mirror version of the standard NATO bombing military-diplomatic playbook and PR justifications for action from Kosovo in 1999 (first Ossetes and Abkhazes as "freedom fighters" and Georgia instead of Serbia, now substituted with DPR/LDPR as "freedom fighters" against Ukraine).

> I'm not sure what proposed agreements you think the US, EU and NATO should have acquiesced to in that time, or what requests they declined to answer.

Russia was not proposing any new agreements at first [1], just to renew all existing and expiring ones signed since the 1960's (ex.:[2] Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe ). Russia started talking about new agreements, and negociating a "new european security architecture" only after the Trump-Putin Summit in 2018.

Bush through Condoleeza-Rice had started dismantling various mutual anti-missile shield treaties, various nuclear safety provisos, litterally refusing to answer to direct and public requests by Putin since 2006-7 to renew or renegotiate them after 7 new members were included in NATO in 2004, and a couple more later.

Meanwhile, cruise missile batteries for which the nuclear warheads can be substituted to conventional in less than an hour were installed in newly 2004 accepted members Romania and Bulgaria, as well as Poland [3].

That attitude was kept by US presidents right until Blinken finally engaged in an exchange this January. Ever since, at almost at all international conferences Putin or Lavrov made public speeches or PR sessions at, they repeated demands to discuss these matters.

Note : As a hillarious aside concerning the current worldwide pearl-clutching on how "nobody knew about Ukraine's bioweapons labs in either Russia or the US", or any other NATO-Ukraine military cooperation before 2013 for that matter, read the first two paragraphs of this 2005 WaPo article on a bioweapons treaty [4] signed right after the Orange revolution [5]. There are photos on the net of Obama next to a stockpile in one of them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_speech_of_Vladimir_Puti...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_missile_defence_system and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_Conventional_Armed_F...

[2] I'm not surprised you haven't even heard about any. I've been working in Eastern Europe for the last 12 years, so I follow news on both "sides" of the media spectrum. On the other side of the now fallen "Berlin Wall" (or if you tuned in on RT), you couldn't fail to hear about it very, very, very regularly from the horse's mouth.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_missile_defence_system

[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2005/08/30/u...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Revolution