Comment by mopsi

> Georgia, the Baltic states, and Ukraine have all been drafted into an American campaign to surround Russia

None of this is true. The US government has for decades preferred to accomodate Russia at the expense of the security of their neighbors and chose to ignore imperialistic ambitions of Russia until the position became untenable. Even now, when Russia has launched the largest war in Europe since Hitler invaded Poland, the US is withholding military aid out of misguided hope that Putin will take the exit ramp that the Americans are offering. But Russia does not have a Khrushchev, instead they have a Hitler-like debiloid who keeps doubling down on a mistake of historic proportions.

If Russia became a normal functional European country instead of being an expansionist dictatorship, my country wouldn't even need a military because Russia is the sole reason why that exists at all. The fact that everyone bordering Russia are arming up is the result of Russian abusive behavior towards its neighbors in the past and in the present. If you go around looting homes, then don't get offended when people start setting up fences and security cameras - or as you'd call it, a vast anglo-american conspiracy to encircle honest thieves.

> Remember the Cuban missile crisis? How the US panicked over Russian presence in Cuba? There's an analogy here.

There is no analogy here. Europe had been rapidly and unilaterally demilitarizing until 2014, whereas Russia moved nuclear weapons nearer and nearer to Europe, recently installing them into the unstable dictatorship in Belarus. Russia just announced that they will be forming two new armies, larger than the ground forces of UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland and many other European countries COMBINED. Instead of responding to a threat (as their propaganda tries to depict), Russia is exploiting the historic weakness of European countries that have tried to build mutually beneficial relations with Russia over the past few decades instead of maintaining Cold War confrontation.

A much better analogy are the naive attempts to seek peace with Hitler in 1938 and 1939, believing that surely Hitler will stop at Poland, and the incredible discussions at the time whether it's ethical to bomb military infrastructure in Germany in response to the invasion of Poland or if the risk of damage to private property is be too large. Kicking the can down the road meant that four years later, allied air forces were carpet bombing German cities day and night without any disregard for such trivialities. Is that what you want, B-52s over Moscow?