Your quote by Albert Einstein is absolutely correct. Then you go down the rabbit hole in the rest of your article in accusing the West of being the provocateurs. You have it exactly backwards. It is Putin, not the West who has created the crisis. It was Putin and his imperialistic ambitions that caused him to invade Ukraine twice, Georgia, Chechnya twice, and Transnistria. His appetite for conquest knows no bounds. It is he who is the war monger. NATO is now and has always been a defensive alliance created to provide a security umbrella against Russian aggression. Finland and Sweden would have had no interest in joining NATO but for Putin‘s continued hostility and threats towards his neighbors.
For decades, Finland and Sweden maintained a position of neutrality, knowing that the best way to maintain the peace was to try to coexist with their volatile neighbor. Yesterday a Russian mil blogger called for the conquering of Finland. Who is creating the problem? It is not the West. The tired old saw that it is NATO that has created all the problems by being a threat to Russian security has repeatedly proven to be a fiction. It is pure propaganda that you have embraced.
Putin does not actually believe that NATO is a threat. It was not even an excuse for his invasion of Ukraine in 2022. You need to rethink your position. It is only when his disastrous special military operation started to unravel that he scrambled to find a reason for his failure. The original justification was to denazify Ukraine. Plus, it was not a real country anyway and rightfully belonged to Russia.
Once he started losing, he recast the conflict as an existential struggle between Russia and the West. It was merely an excuse to explain away the corruption and the impotence of his military. According to him we are running into problems because we are fighting NATO, not just Ukraine. This is a lame excuse, and you know it. Putin is scrambling for self-preservation and to keep control of his country. He never considered NATO a threat. He doesn’t now. If you want to be viewed as an objective commentator, try taking a more balanced point of view.
