There was no active discussion of bringing Ukraine into NATO. Also, wanting to be in NATO (a) is the right of a sovereign nation to decide and (b) does not make

There was no active discussion of bringing Ukraine into NATO. Also, wanting to be in NATO (a) is the right of a sovereign nation to decide and (b) does not make that nation Nazis. Putin asserts Ukraine is not sovereign and is full of Nazis as his primary reason for invading after spending months saying he had no intention of invading. So he is a liar at best, delusional at worst. Russia agreed to the Budapest Memorandum recognizing Ukraine's sovereignty as an independent state. Russia is also a party to the U.N. Charter as a founding member, and the Geneva Conventions. Those have all been torn up by Putin. So I for one choose to not believe anything he says, and find him completely untrustworthy. Any promise he signs is worthless including one to not invade Ukraine, or any other country, if they agree to stay out of NATO. Staying out of NATO is not a security guarantee so long as Putin is the one in charge. He presented not a single complaint before the U.N. about Ukraine before invading, after promising he wouldn't. And as Putin is making it increasingly clear the stability-instability paradox may be a real and true thing, we have to consider that avoiding nuclear war at all costs itself has a cost which is that of principles. The principle being, you don't fucking roll tanks into people's backyards in contravention of the U.N. charter. The whole goddamn reason that institution exists is to prevent wars exactly like this. That it hasn't prevented it makes me question the trap we're now in: nuclear weapons are being used as a shield to permit a country to commit worse atrocities with conventional weapons than had nuclear weapons not existed, and that begs escalation all the way to a nuclear event. There is now a much bigger gap between conventional war and mutually assured destruction. We can't go back before Putin did this. The world cannot just glibly accept what's happened as a result of fear of nukes, allowing that to make us ignore our principles. And our principles are the U.N. charter - that's the best thing that most nations agree on most of the time. There isn't anything else. If we lose that, we have nothing, and then we are certain to repeat the mistakes of WW1 and WW2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxZlaiuicYM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxZlaiuicYM