Ukraine were no where near joining NATO at the time, although as it turns out - if they were their motivation would have been entirely valid. Russia didn’t want Ukraine to join NATO because it would prevent them from annexing Ukraine, that’s simple logic.

> within 48 hours they were engaged in negotiations with Ukraine that involved 0 land concessions

So you think the plan was to invade Ukraine to scare them into a hand shake that they wouldn’t join NATO? I really don’t want to insult you but…

▲ somenameforme 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Not joining NATO would be an extremely small price to pay relative to what war could, and ultimately did, entail.

There's a nice timeline here [1] of relations between Ukraine and NATO. It's an archived version from the day before the invasion began, so there's no hindsight posts. Things were accelerating rapidly on the Ukraine-NATO front. In January 2022 there was apparently even a bill that was to be introduced in the US declaring Ukraine a "NATO+ country" immediately. And NATO's responses towards Russia's expressed concerns began to be completely dismissive with not even a vague allusion to reconciliation.

So I think the main goal was certainly to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, but I think a major secondary goal was for Russia to make it clear that their claims of red lines and such are not toothless. If a country makes repeated claims of things being a red-line but never acts on such claims, then their future claims will be casually dismissed.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ukraine%E2%80%93N...

▲ mopsi 2 hours ago | parent [-]

  > Things were accelerating rapidly on the Ukraine-NATO front.

They weren't. Ukraine is still nowhere near getting a membership action plan, which is the formal start of membership negotiations.

We saw with Finland and Sweden how quickly entry into the organization can progress if there's a will in the alliance to accept new members. We have not seen such will regarding Ukraine.

The whole "blame NATO" narrative is just a waste of everyone's time and completely ignores the internal developments in Russia and the ambitions of Putin and his clan. The main goal of the ex-Soviet security apparatus is to restore their lost empire and the special privileged position of the security services within it. To Europeans, the Cold War and the Iron Curtain were abnormalities that have been rectified; to the current generation of Russian decision-makers, the Cold War was a normalcy that they strive to return to. Russian dissidents have been warning for decades that the destruction of Russian democracy would sooner or later lead to resurgence of Soviet imperial thinking, and that's exactly what we're seeing.

NATO itself bears little importance in this. Russia is against all forms of European cooperation and would prefer to see countries alone and isolated, because it would permit attacking them one by one, instead of facing a joint front that they can't beat.

	▲	fakedang 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Doesn't matter now. Ukraine will never join NATO. Poland will be happy to veto their entry, and will be happy having Ukraine be the buffer state that can sacrifice its youth for the sake of Europe. What Zelensky did with honoring the UPA was irredeemable. Heck, were Belarus to overthrow Lukashenko, they have a better chance of joining NATO than Ukraine now.