> And I do feel Russia has had a very valid argument regarding the NATO threat and USA has been aware of this for a long time, still they decided to poke the be

> And I do feel Russia has had a very valid argument regarding the NATO threat and USA has been aware of this for a long time, still they decided to poke the bear. There's a good talk from Mike McFaul at Stanford [1] who outlines how Russia under Putin for the longest time was interested in joining NATO. Putin saw NATO as an opportunity, not a threat. NATO is a scapegoat - what Putin really seems to be afraid of is the fall of dictatorships and the rise of democracies around him, and he thinks the US is behind it. So he is anti-US, but the whole anti-NATO thing is a false narrative - Putin is anti-democracy. The talk explains it very well. > USA sabotaged the Russian-German pipeline and all Western mass media acts like nothing has happened. Why would the US do that? I don't see the motivation. The current narrative, that it was a faction of the Ukraine, seems the most plausible to me. Russia had no incentive to blow it up either. > All the Western politicians that are pushing for war will not be on the frontlines themselves and most likely neither will their children. True. But then again, right now we're in a situation where most politicians are actually rather conservative about the war. Just think about how long it took for heavy artillery and tanks to be shipped to Ukraine. Even now that the US and Germany are sending tanks, very few European nations are following suit - not even some that previously touted loudly that they were ready to send them, and that only Germany was holding them back. Both Europe and the US are acting rather carefully, for better or worse. The West is definitely not in the business of warmongering. > It’s a shame the Western world and Ukraine deceived Russia with the Minsk accords, as Germany recently admitted [0]. We didn’t have to be in this situation. This is the article that your source refers to: https://www.zeit.de/2022/51/angela-merkel-russland-fluechtlingskrise-bundeskanzler/komplettansicht?utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F https://www.zeit.de/2022/51/angela-merkel-russland-fluechtli... Unfortunately it's paywalled, but I did sign up (their 1€ trial offer was cheap enough, and I'm German, so easy for me to read). I don't think the WSWS article you linked to cites fairly. While the citation is accurate, it jumps over one main fact: At the time when the Minsk agreement was made, Russia had illegally de-facto annexed parts of Ukraine. Everyone knew it, even though Russia called it "separatists". Putin didn't have the guts to start an all-out war back then, that took a few more years, but the fact that the majority of these separatists were Russian soldiers was widely reported back then already. Given that Russia had started destabilising Ukraine and annexing parts of it, Merkel's comment of buying the Ukraine time to prepare for more aggressive action from Russia is perfectly reasonable, and in hindsight also the correct political action. Russia wasn't deceived with the Minsk accords. Russia was already the aggressor back then. We wouldn't have this war if Russia wasn't invading its neighbour. --- [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wbzf0ix2G5I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wbzf0ix2G5I