I really don’t understand why this is so difficult for you. The US killed over half a million children in Iraq and Madeline Albright went on national TV and said she’d do it again because it was worth it. Hillary Clinton said “We came! We saw! He died!” Laughing about the sodomization of Gaddafi with a bayonet in a war that the US literally created by funnelling weapons, money, and intelligence to partisans in Libya when it was the most prosperous country in the continent and had the highest living standards for its people. NATO was involved in that war of aggression that was helmed by the US.

The entire world saw all of that happen and understood what it meant - except Americans. Americans looked at Libya and said “Gaddafi was a bad man who hated his people and made their lives miserable and then when the people rose up he tried to violently repress him so we had to go in there and protect them!” The rest of the world saw that and went “Holy shit the US is just willing to openly start civil wars, destroy entire countries, turn them into open air slave markets, gloat about it on the international stage, and not a single institution is going to challenge their narrative let alone stop them”

So when NATO and the US show up on Ukraine and start joint military exercises, and then a right wing US friendly movement takes over in a “popular uprising”, complete with neo-Nazis, open murder of civilians by neo-Nazis, and US politicians and military personnel on the ground, it’s time to take notice.

When you recognize that the Nazi blitzkrieg and Napoleon’s invasion both leveraged the very vulnerable parts of the Russian border, which just so happen to overlap with the Ukraine border, you don’t wait to see if the EuroFascists are going to try to invade your country and kill tens of millions of your people.

Russia made a security-based decision. Was it the right decision? We don’t know. We can’t know. But to argue that Russia had absolutely zero possible security threats is essentially saying that the only thing Russia is ever allowed to defend itself against is a direct strike.

You don’t believe that for anyone else in the world, except maybe China. You would certainly have a problem with Russian troops in Venezuela, or Chinese troops on Canada, or a collation of Russian, Chinese, and North Korean troops amassing in Cuba. And if the US attacked them because they were clearly amassing in a threatening way, you wouldn’t say the US had zero national security concerns.

But because you have been raised to believe that Russia can have zero legitimate interests in the world, that it is literally impossible for it to act in self defense unless directly attacked, you watch as the US builds base after base, 600+ in countries all over the world, and think this is fine.

By the way, this whole concept of voluntarily accepting a US or NATO base on your sovereign territory, literally giving up sovereignty over some of your land and putting your country into a position to basically be pre-invaded should you ever come to blows with the US - we’ve seen this before. It’s called appeasement. When the Third Reich first start expanding, it didn’t do it by launching wars, it did it through politics. The West appeased Germany, and Germany expanded.

You recognize the US is a violent fascist country. You recognize that appeasement of the Third Reich was a terrible policy. But you just cannot put two and two together and for whatever reason you believe that allowing the US and NATO to expand “voluntarily” is not appeasement and that Russia finally fighting back to stop the slow march and assert its national security interests makes Russia not only evil but WORSE because they actually sacrifice their people for this mission.

I mean, it defies reason. I really struggle to understand how you don’t feel the emotion driving your argument away from reason and towards contradiction.