> I am not an US citizen and I don't care about the US-centric whataboutism.

Understood. Well now you know how I felt when you keep saying I’m Russian and ascribing views to me that I don’t have.

> This is simply not true. All the Russian propaganda memes of the US forcing Eastern Europe into NATO and so forth that you too rehash are demonstrably false.

Given all the warnings Clinton and Bush ignored from experts, given the aggression NATO has displayed in Yugoslavia and Libya, the refusal to accept Russia, and given the number of bases and the all-but-stated raison d’etre of NATO to have Russia as a geopolitical enemy, I’m pretty sure Russia would not want this organization to surround it with missiles.

Neither would USA want to be surrounded by its geopolitical foes or have them turning their neighbors against them, much less fomenting a revolution. In fact the Monroe Doctrine long ago claimed THE ENTIRE WESTERN HEMISPHERE as a protectorate of the USA, but meanwhile USA went all around the world seeking to turn Russia’s former allies against it.

I just told you that a solid majority of Ukrainians said NO TO NATO but yet NATO persisted. Bush started this meme of Ukraine in NATO. I shared the poll data and mainstream links with you. DATA AND REALITY SHOULD MATTER MORE than repeating the words “Russian propaganda”.

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2010/03/29/ukraine-says-n...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nato-ukraine-bush-idUSL01...

Explain thei. Reuters is repeating Russian propaganda? American experts and diplomats predicting war are Russian stooges? Billions of people around the world are Russian assets? Or what?

It does not. Representatives from 141 countries of the world at the UN condemned Russia for the war, not NATO or anyone else.

That was never up for a vote. Show me where the UN was asked to vote on whether they condemn NATO for this conflict, or blame NATO or anything of the sort.

They did even more overwhelmingly blame USA for the 20th year in a row for the Cuba embargo and called for USA to lift it. But USA did not. Do you likewise spend as much time on this for the last 20 years? No. Why this double standard with Russia? I have some pretty good guesses.

That's certainly not the case in Russia, where the majority of people continue to support the war with Ukraine.

You’re just proving my point. The majority of regular Russians did not want to go and kill Ukrainians themselves. Their government and mainstream media had to radicalize them over time and tell them lies (eg that it is overrun with Nazis), just like Ukrainian and US people are told lies by their governments too, and very likely your government tells YOU one sided lies too. (Lithuania and Estonia would gleefully get NATO to fight Russia if they could, just as Castro in the Cuban Missile Crisis mindlessly wanted to instigate USA vs USSR even when neither country was going to be that reckless.)

11 million Russians have family in Ukraine. Those are stories of love. It takes a lot of stories of hate and killing for them to turn on each other.

I am saying that all governments are telling people half truths and the media is radicalizing them for years, highlighting only the bad stuff others did, and with an agenda. And media that doesn’t play along is banned!

The majority of US citizens supported the Iraq war the first yeats (as high as 73%). Why? Same reasons. If I asked people back then why we were attacked on 9/11 they’d say Muslims hate us for our freedoms. You think that was their original thought? Do you truly believe “russia hacked the election” and “unprovoked and unjustified” are original thoughts?

But I will give you credit for something… you have actually cared about polling of the Russian public and their support for the war! Good job, yes polls matter. (Someone here said polls of Indians, Chinese and the entire world don’t matter - some kind of metaphor about people drinking sand.)

I give you credit because some people mindlessly still repeat that this is Putin’s war, one man’s war. And the Russian public is given a pass because they say they are just too afraid to say what they think, or polls are unreliable. They have a fantasy that if Putin is killed or removed then everything would be better.

No, Medvedev and Zhirinovsky and others would have been FAR bigger war hawks than Putin, and really anyone at all including Putin’s greatest liberal critics in Russia would have the same reaction (which you say is totally baseless):

In 2008, Burns, then the American ambassador to Moscow, wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”

So we have two options here:

1) Russians are uniquely bloodthirsty orcs who want Ukrainians to be raped and killed

2) The Russian public believes Ukraine in NATO is an existential threat for their country, believes that their leaders have exhausted all peaceful ways to avert this war, and support the war just as US would have supported a war against Cuba in the Cuban Missile Crisis if USSR pumped it full of weapons.