Firstly no one in Ukraine or NATO had any thoughts of invading Russia. Even now after Russia launched its war, no one wants to invade Russia. Why invade some godforsaken place with the world's largest nuclear arsenal? Makes no sense.
Second if they wanted to invade they could have gone from Estonia or Latvia which share a border with Russia and are fairly close to Moscow and St Petersburg.
My take is the Russians regard Ukraine as Russian lands and Ukrainians as their property and felt the west was trying to steal it from them by promoting democracy and independence.
I'm not claiming that it makes sense to a rational outside observer, I'm just pointing out part of the strategic calculus from the perspective of a paranoid Russian leader. They conceptualize the world in a fundamentally different way that's hard for westerners to intuitively comprehend. And obviously that wasn't the only factor, they thought they had multiple reasons for acting.
Except Putin is not, and has absolutely never been paranoid of NATO invading Russia.
He literally believed the west would barely react to this invasion. They didn't even take hundreds of billions of dollars of hard cash out of foreign accounts.
Russia continues to pull defensive weapons like SAM systems from the NATO border to use them in Ukraine
Because "NATO invasion" has always been bullshit.
The strategic calculus was that Putin has spent a decade killing anyone who tells him something he doesn't want to hear, so a couple years ago he heard "We could take over all of Ukraine in 3 days and they would welcome us with open arms" and he believed it.
Vladimir Putin genuinely believed that they could blitz Ukraine and be thanked for it.
A reminder that for Putin to genuinely believe that Ukrainian people who the soviets killed and repressed quite significantly would choose to be Russian willingly, he must have believed that EuroMaidan was not genuine protest.
Putin believes the CIA did it.
Which is yet again another reason why the "Protection from NATO" argument is horse shit, because Putin does not believe that a country has to be in NATO for it to be used against Russia.
Firstly no one in Ukraine or NATO had any thoughts of invading Russia. Even now after Russia launched its war, no one wants to invade Russia. Why invade some godforsaken place with the world's largest nuclear arsenal? Makes no sense.
Second if they wanted to invade they could have gone from Estonia or Latvia which share a border with Russia and are fairly close to Moscow and St Petersburg.
My take is the Russians regard Ukraine as Russian lands and Ukrainians as their property and felt the west was trying to steal it from them by promoting democracy and independence.