Thread by @BonicMichael

To understand why Putin invaded Ukraine you have to know NATO-Russia history. Lee Stranahan, Carmine Sabia and Ian Schilling analyze the reasons for Russia's actions which the news media ignore:
Putin Calls the West an "Empire of Lies" via
@YouTube

2/[Excerpts]
Lee Stranahan: [43:22] “Ian what’s your take on this war in general, military action in general, on the part of Russia? I think Putin tried everything negotiating-wise, waited it out for 8 years…”
Ian Schilling: “Well, they pushed Putin too far, didn’t they? Obama

3/"started constructing first-strike nuclear missile silos in Romania and Poland. They were completed during Trump but Obama started in about 2015…They’re capable of launching Tomahawk nuclear cruise missiles at Moscow! And a thousand miles into Russia and Russia would only have

4/"a 5 minutes warning. If they launched Tomahawk cruise missiles from Romania or Poland, Russia would have about 5 minutes to decide whether it was a real attack or a hoax and what to do about it and whether to launch their missiles! So the chances of making a mistake and

5/"starting a nuclear war over an accident…[A]nd now they’ve put these nuclear missile silos in Romania and Poland, Russia’s very worried, naturally! It’s the Cuban Missile Crisis all over again!”
Carmine Sabia: “No, absolutely. Russia has an absolute bone of contention.

6/"I think to dispute that is ludicrous or nationalist and you’re just not looking at it from anybody else’s perspective. Russia has absolute serious national security concerns.”
Lee Stranahan: “…Zelensky said about a few days before Putin decided to take this military action

7/"[that] Ukraine needs to get nuclear weapons again…[H]e was very clear. Zelensky himself said “We may need to get nuclear weapons again”, and that’s even closer than Poland. In case 4 minutes wasn’t enough let’s go to 2.”
Ian Schilling: “I mean, well, they just pushed Putin

8/"too far didn’t they? Biden didn’t want to even talk about the nuclear missile silos in Poland and Romania [Trump would have]. And Putin’s other concern is he doesn’t wan’t Ukraine and Georgia to become NATO members because he wants [them] to remain neutral. He doesn’t want

9/"NATO in Ukraine or Georgia, because that’s too close! And the other thing that triggered him off was the Nazis in Donbass started shooting the civilians in the separatist areas of Donbass again, and they were killing people and they said they were going to escalate it! So he

10/"had a choice. I mean half the people in Donbass are Russian citizens now. Russia offered them all Russian passports and Russian citizenship and about half of them took him up. So Putin couldn’t allow his own people, his own Russian citizens, to be slaughtered. So he had to

11/"do something…”
Tedd Rall [1:43:22] “I think this was one of those things that was a long time coming…The NATO policy of expansion east steadily…Like in 1991, basically Western Europe NATO was 800 miles away from Russia’s borders. And at that time George HW Bush and

12/"Americans said “Don’t worry” to Yeltsin, and later to Putin, “Don’t worry, we’re not coming towards you”. Now, the Baltics have joined, all of Eastern Europe has joined NATO and Ukraine is the weak spot, right? I was thinking about this. The Nazis invaded the Soviet Union via

13/"Ukraine in 1941 and at the end of this misadventure 4 years later 27 million Soviet citizens were dead. That is not something that if you’re Russian you can forget or overlook or think is not important. So you kind of need, if you’re Russia, to have a friendly Ukraine next

14/"door. You need that. And to have them applying to join NATO is just, it’s kind of like, “No, we can’t allow that”…It is really hard to see how Russia could let what Ukraine was doing, especially after the 2014 coup, pass. How could they?…You can’t possibly imagine, for

15/"example, the U.S. allowing Mexico to become part of the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War…I just really wish that NATO and the US had taken Russia’s concerns seriously, awhich they never did.”
Lee Stranahan: “No, they were very clearly not taking them seriously when this

16/"intensified in the past few months…I think that’s why Vladimir Putin famously said “empire of lies”…The U.S. has been lying about it.”

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