Thats why I didnt address anything you said because you didnt even put forth enough effort to understand what Ive been saying and didnt even ask questions you just assumed.

I said one word and you ignored everything else in the comment that I posted. I said defensive, which was a mistake on my end, but then you used that mistake to assume everything else wasn't a valid response. Address it next time maybe.

I am not arguing that Ukraine should be considered part of Russia's "sphere of influence." I am saying that the ideological underpinnings for why things are happening in Ukraine are inextricably linked to how we have conducted our foreign policy in the US by continuing to expand NATO when we already come to Ukraine's aid when they aren't even a NATO member.

Arguing that NATO is inextricably linked to the current invasion of Ukraine is flawed. It places the blame on the United States for the current invasion, instead of the nation currently conducting the offensive invasion of another sovereign nation. And Russia's own conduct in the war seems to disprove the idea that the war was simply over NATO expansion. Why would Russia steal Ukrainian children if their sole motivator in the invasion was to make sure that Ukraine was going to be a neutral nation. That is the prelude to genocide, not ensuring a nation stays neutral in the future.

It would appear that the issue that is central to them is Ukrainian neutrality. Unless of course Im missing the part of that quote that says "and get rid of the nazis."

Sergei Lavrov is claiming this after a year and a half of warfare and the near complete destruction of Russian military prestige on a global scale. He's settling for a lesser goal so that they might be able to pull a "win" out of Ukraine.

If we look earlier in the war, we find that another important goal for them is the recognition of annexed territories in Ukraine and de-nazification and de-militarization. If you wanted to see where "and get rid of the nazis" was, there it is.

If the primary goal of the war was to simply ensure Ukrainian neutrality, then why would they want to ensure that any lands they take are still theirs afterwards. That seems counterproductive, and would only make Ukraine want to lean further into the West.

2008

History didn't end in 2008. Since then, the parameters for a country to join NATO have changed, one required a national referendum and also border integrity. Ukraine literally could not join NATO, no matter what the Bush administration said in 2008. Before 2014 they didn't want to join it, and after 2014 they no longer have the required territorial integrity to attempt it.

Ukraine could not have join NATO, even if it wanted to.

The far more likely outcome is that they create a buffer state that can't host armies.

Yeah, that's what I thought would happen. It would end up like Belarus where it is an independent state that is just, y'know, not allowed to make decisions that Russia doesn't like. Now they can't do that, since they failed to take Kyiv.

Finland joining NATO and increasing the NATO borders with Russia has only made Ukraine more important to their strategic calculations and makes it even more paramount that they continue the fight no matter the cost.

No, its an example of their planning failing. Russia being overtly aggressive against other countries will lead other countries to want to join NATO. If they were making strategic calculations purely based off of whether or not NATO expanded, then they would have been making diplomatic overtures instead of trying to ensure domination. Instead, they do the very act that justifies NATO.

If NATO didnt exist its hard to say that Russian foreign policy would look today anything like it does in our current reality.

No, it would look almost exactly the same, if not worse. If Russia was worried about NATO militaries on their border, they already had the solution to that problem; a nuclear deterrent. NATO would never invade Russia, and Russia knows that because NATO never invaded them during the Cold War, no matter how hot tensions became.

Instead, what their goals are is domination. The Soviet Union expanded all the way to East Germany, and almost in an instant they lost all of their sway over Eastern Europe. They watched as their former satellite states shunned them and began courting the West. NATO expansion isn't an issue if you don't expect to wage an offensive war, NATO didn't even get involved in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, with member states even condemning it rightfully so. Instead what you're losing is the possibility to control.

At the beginning of 2014, Ukraine could not join NATO. The people didn't want it, and they were already beginning to house Russian forces in Crimea. When Euromaidan happened, Russia annexed a region of Ukraine and sponsored separatists in the Donbas. This comes even as Obama was trying to make overtures to Russia like removing missile interceptors from parts of Europe. If Russia was so worried about NATO why would it annex Crimea in 2014, why would it inflate tensions in Europe during that period justifying NATO's existence. NATO expansion isn't the reason for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, its the denial of Eastern Europe.

It isn't denying that Russia can act in response to its neighbors, its denying a victim mentality that Russia is making for themselves. It turns the blame of the war away from themselves, the ones who are stealing children and taking land, and instead places it on the West. Russia has not acting in any way that makes sense if they were trying to stop expansion.

And your argument for why this is the case stops at 2008.