(sorry, it's a long one, you caught me on a day off, so I wrote long)

> Don't they have a right to decide? So why not let them take that risk if they wish?

Of course they do, they are recognized as a sovereign nation.

And again, without painting Russia as an innocent dove it ain't : this is why you won't find Lavrov or Putin ever having formally and directly asked Ukraine not to join. They limited themselves to saying publicly it was not something they wanted from their neighbour.

The only thing they asked formally and directly Ukraine not to do was 8 years ago about a planned EU trade treaty which directly contradicted the one they had already had in place for 10-15 years - that helped trigger Maidan.

What Russia has been asking is from NATO : that NATO should agree to never seek Ukraine out as member (which NATO did), or if Ukraine formally asked, to refuse them forever [0] - this was what the entire un-diplomatic ballet we saw last three months was about.

For an everyday's man analogy, see [1] below.

-

> Perhaps the real criticism should be that NATO dragged their feet for too long

I don't believe they did drag their feet (see [0] below). It's just that Moscow threw a monkey wrench into an accelerated entry with Crimea, just as it did in Georgia with Ossetia.

-

> How do we know that NATO fears weren't simply a useful pretext for empire building ambitions?

IMHO this particular attack's public rationale is 2/3rd a pretext (it's indeed geo-economics), and 1/3rd a justification (NATO has been starting wars and "color revolutions" all over the place for 30 years at a sustained rythm, you objectively can't trust them not to continue).

Adam Shiff said it in front of the Senate a couple of years ago: "U.S. backs Ukraine ‘so we can fight Russia over there, and not here"

But in truth/big pictures, yes it's empires (plural) building and management. More importantly, it's cultural and economic systems clashing, as we're living in a networked world more than a world of nations now.

Lavrov made it extremely plain two days ago: "It's not about Ukraine at all, it's about the ordering of the world. The current crisis is a pivotal moment in modern history. It reflects the battle over what the world order will look like,[...]"

-

> aggressive and unwanted Russian political interference, maybe they thought that Russia would invade anyway, and this was their only way to prevent that from happening.

I have a more neutral view.

The country is unbelievably corrupt and disfunctional. Not one person there controls the whole of the state, least of all the president. It's several overlapping influence networks (and mafias). All presidents, ruling cabinets, oligarchs since then were always compromitted to a high degree by either side.

No power bloc ever let the territory Ukraine be truly sovereign ever, even less so after Leonid Kuchma's departure.

As such, NATO did not prevent or "try to prevent" anything. It's just slowly losing this particular battle of interference to armored brigades, while it won others such fights in Ukraine in the past.

For having followed Ukrainian politics for 15 years (friends and work friends), and setting aside his apparently heroic resistance and actual presidential behaviour the last few weeks, I find anybody calling Zelensky anything else than a supremely corrupt authoritarian puppet of Kolomoiski's (and now of any of Kolomoiski's "friends") woefully uninformed. Same as for calling its parliament "democratic".

IMHO, this why what should in fact be the richest, largest country in Europe on paper is in fact the poorest. It is a state without a nation (yet) whose institutions are weak enough for it to not having ever known true independence and true sovereignty.

-

> Why should we capitulate and allow one authoritarian nation to dictate the foreign policy decisions of a democratic neighbor?

Again, my view is much more neutral, but also way way more cynical an blasé than yours.

I find calling Ukraine a democracy somewhat unrelated to its reality for at least 20 years. Similarly, I don't think anybody is defending democracy or the lives of ukrainians there right now.

To start, I generally replace the words "civilised western world" with "self-content wealthy armed nations controlling all flows of money", and Russia is "disgruntled armed nation controlling a lot of commodities flows".

Why so ?

I lost family to NATO airstrikes, then depleted uranium cancers. I then learned over the years, as people started talking, scandals erupted, archives were opened, posthumous autobiographies were published, tribunals made judgments that the leaders of various sides in my country shared bank ownerships in Paris and London, that 3/4th of all regional wars' outcomes were mostly upon in much in advance following plans made in the 50s by infiltrated ex-Gelhen SS officers and NATO leadership in secret treaties, that recent intel. services heads and a couple prime ministers were CIA and BND assets, that Biden in 1985 as Senator was charged by a Reagan NatSec order prepared by Bush 1st to do the US political side of split the country, etc, etc ,etc. Could go on for hours.

Consequently, I can't believe all the people alive and in power then in the western political establishment became suddeny genuinely interested in the good health of other populations.

As such, all the concepts you used in that sentence are, for me, just an efficacious, long running and successfull PR/indoctrination ploy.

None maps to any situtation in reality [2]. It's just way better structured than anything the KGB ever did.

-

> There is no evidence of this that I've seen, and absent that evidence such a phrasing is misleading

To me, it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, smells like a duck.

The treaty was about cataloguing and destroying the stock as per existing treaties - that takes some months to a year, not 17 years, and you don't renovate the labs.

Also, "food surveillance" ? There enough small medical labs on every 5th street corner all over eastern europe for that to be a ridiculous claim.

To wit, somebody unearthed a contract further sample gathering contracted through a Pentagon tender with Black & Veach to opperate it as such (also build 4 new labs). Also, nobody in the US disavowed the list of bacteries and viruses studied as part of these contracts, as presented by the Russian, and confirmed by the WHO press release - whereas such samples should have been announced to the BWRC treaty office on day 1 first in 1997, then again at the signature of the 2005 Obama Lugar treaty.

Finally, the US DoD guy in charge of counter-proliferation does more than just hint at it in a pre-invasion interview concerning these labs [3].

Anyways, we'll know for sure if the Kremlin is full of it or not soon enough, they are reportedly preparing a well documented lawsuit, with plenty of witnesses.

-

[0] Now of course, public claims set aside, the reality : 3/4th of Ukraines Army were NATO trained last 8 years, 2 bataillons each for 2 months, then 2 months on the Donbass front; between 5-7B$ in equipment were transferred/bought with IMF loans; NATO military intelligence and satellite recon were, as is now obvious, already fully integrated with UA MoD command (as per an article I saw, IIRC in The Guardian, just Britain evacuated 700 officers the week before the attack); the SBU was basically a CIA regional office; Britain was almost finished building a NATO-standards port south of Kherson; the first half of Christa Freeland's career; Burisma, the company with a CIA director, Biden's son, Kolomoiski on the board had taken control of several gas transhipping nodes.

[1]

In more plain words, some guy's ex-girlfriend has all rights to ask a neighbor two houses over out, as well as to ask him to move in next door together. She's her own woman after all.

That guy can also still politely ask said neighbour to agree to refuse her advances and to move together for the sake of peace in the street. That is ok too, the neighbor is also his own man.

After all, both guys have violent pasts, and have short triggers. Also, the guy and the neighbor already had several fight, including the neighbor punching the guy 8 years ago + both fighting about another girlfriend 14 years ago [1].

Now Russia here is the guy who did that peacefully until it decided to beat the ex-girlfriend up on Feb 25th.

But biggest problem actually is both the neighbor and the guy are into polyamory. In fact they both have harems of babymamas they gaslight into giving them hard earned cash. They are also both supposedly reformed sociopathic criminals.

Funnily enough, the unsufferable Home Owners Association board of the next street over (the EU Commission) made everybody there start a hunger strike for some reason, supposedly because the guy is running a grocery, while leaving for the girl baseball bats she can't reach right outside her house.

Unfunnily, everybody defunded the UN cops.

[2] As spoken by former Prime Minister Henry Palmerstone in the British Parliament in 1848, the full quote is as follows: "We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow."

[3] https://thebulletin.org/2022/02/us-official-russian-invasion...