What Russia is doing is analogous to what USA did in the Cuban Missile Crisis. You can't allow a neighboring country, especially one that was a former ally, to join an enemy military alliance and pose an existential threat to some of your citizens, by, say, pointing nuclear missiles at you -- neither now nor in 15 years. Any country would react to being surrounded and cornered, including today's USA. That at least has some relation to self-defense and preservation: you don't want to take the chances that a "purely defensive alliance" which already bombed destroyed Yugoslavia and Libya will now stop bombing and destroying.

So what you said honestly seems backwards to me on every level, including logical, ethical, and reality.

Logical: You say we should not "worry about all the little problems before starting to solve the big ones." So are you trying to say that going halfway around the world, bombing, invading, occupying and destroying multiple countries, and resulting in over a million deaths, is a much smaller problem, than invading one country to prevent it from joining a hostile alliance? The number of countries is larger. The death toll is also larger. The destruction is larger. But you have it backwards somehow. If you applied your principle, it would mean we would actually have to prioritize preventing USA from doing this anymore, not Russia. I am saying we should do both.

Ethical: How is going halfway around the world to attack countries that pose literally ZERO threat to your country, less worthy of moral condemnation, than getting militarily involved around your own localized borders in order to stop that same "globetrotter" from flipping your neighbor against you? One has an actual connection to self defense, and the other literally does not. But you have it backwards, again.

Reality: billions of people recognize that NATO's expansion led to this, USA's own experts predicted it, and even the Ukrainians themselves did NOT want to be part of NATO, when George W Bush vowed to bring them into NATO kicking and screaming anyway. Every sound bite you are you told to repeat, including "open door policy", "purely defensive" and "unprovoked and unjustified", is backwards.

Ukraine says NO to NATO: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2010/03/29/ukraine-says-n...

Bush vows to press for Ukraine in NATO: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nato-ukraine-bush/bush-vo...

Decades of warnings predicting NATO expansion leading to this exact war: https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-follows-decades-of-w...

50 prominent US policy experts said this back in 1999: https://www.armscontrol.org/act/1997-06/arms-control-today/o...

Billions of people hold NATO responsible for Ukraine war more than Russia: https://thewire.in/world/more-indians-hold-us-nato-responsib...

Even the pope says it repeatedly and doubles down on it: https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2022/06/14/italy-vat...

Nigel Farage warned about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=KqE7UTptgGg

Tulsi Gabbard and many politicians say it could have been avoided: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF5oPNjMZw4

Progressives try to push for peace: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/25/democrats-jo...

The very peacemakers who were brokering peace in the first week of the war say USA and UK blocked the peace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yma0LxyVVs

I could go on... but my point is it's backwards. This is plain and simple a way for USA to push through a surrounding of Russia at Ukraine's expense ... if they can get it done, great. If not, well Ukraine paid the price, they "wanted to fight" after all.