No mental gymnastics. But are you aware of the Monroe Doctrine? Please you guys need to look it up. Countries have geopolitical red lines. This might give you an idea of Russia's red lines. But then again, I love it when people bring Russia into Israel thread so we can continue this in the Russia thread.
"While not specifically the Monroe Doctrine, Alexander Hamilton desired to control the sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere, particularly in North America,[failed verification] but this was extended to the Latin American colonies by the Monroe Doctrine.[9] But Hamilton, writing in the Federalist Papers, was already wanting to establish the United States as a world power and hoped that it would suddenly become strong enough to keep the European powers outside of the Americas, despite the fact that the European countries controlled much more of the Americas than the U.S. herself.[8] Hamilton expected that the United States would become the dominant power in the New World and would, in the future, act as an intermediary between the European powers and any new countries blossoming near the U.S.[8]"
So America wants to dominate the entire Western hemisphere, including holding Cuba hostage under sanctions for many years, and will not tolerate any Russian or Chinese military influence on Mexico, but America has no problem putting NATO on countries that Russia sees as part of its influence. This is very troubling attitude because you only care about your own interests while not even respecting any other country's, especially a former superpower's, interests. Russia has allowed Sweden into NATO, no problem. But it says it won't let Ukraine or Georgia in and has gone to war over it. You don't like it and almost everyone here doesn't like it. So what? Great powers have these weird policies, just like America has the policy to not only dominate the Western hemisphere, but basically the entire globe with its 800 military bases. Russia has a military base in Syria at the request of the Syrian government.
Iraqis voted to kick the US out but the US is still there. The Iraqis don't like it either but does America care? Obviously not. Same thing with Syria. America occupies a third of Syria illegally. The Syrians and Iraqis want America out but of course that won't happen. Sovereignty, right guys?! LOL what a joke. US has no respect for sovereignty and people here will defend this while only attacking Russia.
The problem is that Western people are too one sided and cannot even acknowledge that there are other powerful countries too and they have their own interests. Letting Ukraine not part of NATO would have been better but if you are going to train them and arm them, since 2015, you need to put them into NATO asap. It was a huge policy failure of America to not bring Ukraine into NATO asap after arming and training it since 2015. This could have prevented this war because Russia is not going to attack NATO. Again, I don't favor or reject any of this as my opinion but I am showing you what happened. It's not up to me to decide these things but we can look at them from a more or less objective point of view.
If it were up to me, I would reduce military spending of the world by 99%. This would end homelessness for the most part too, by the way.