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 d

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.