There are a lot of people in crypto who are too "anti-establishment" for their own good.
Russia is imperialist to the core. I don't care there are and have been other imperialist powers in the world. For those who live in Eastern Europe, Russian imperialism is the only imperialism that is a problem.
You are Romanian. It means that Russian imperialism is your problem, too.
(And no, the USA or NATO did not cause Russian imperialism. Russian imperialism predates both by several centuries.)
Anything that weakens Russia in the long term is to the benefit of everyone who lives in Eastern Europe.
Russia cares much less about NATO than it lets on. Russia KNOWS NATO will not attack Russia because of the nuclear deterrent. That is why Russia has only maintained a relatively small conventional military force. The number of soldiers in Russian land forces is only around 300,000. Russia concentrated around 200,000 troops around Ukraine before the attack in February. Its combat losses have been significant. Tens of thousands are KIA and the estimated number of WIA and MIA is difficult to estimate but usually it is around three times the number of KIA, which would put the total loss in manpower close to 100,000. This is why Russia has been emptying its garrisons near Norway, Finland and Estonia of remaining troops and even recruiting prisoners in the last few weeks.
Russia is a country without natural or ethnic borders. It's a Moscow-centric empire, pure and simple. It has conquered the lands of dozens of peoples and forcefully annexed them, done ethnic cleansing, has destroyed cultures and forcefully assimilated many peoples in the last five centuries.
Russian leaders and many ordinary Russians do not consider Ukraine to be a separate nation. The motivation of Russian leaders to attack Ukraine is to destroy the Ukrainian state and to eradicate the Ukrainian nation and forcefully assimilate it into Russia. This attitude predates any Western involvement with Ukraine by centuries.
Ukraine is fighting back and doing it very well. To waste this opportunity to separate Ukraine from Russia for good would be incredibly foolish. Anyone who thinks Russian ambitions to rebuild their empire will stop at the borders of Ukraine is a fool. Russia never stops anywhere until it meets a strong enough opposing force. How do you think it got as big in the first place?
Russia is the only country that poses a security threat to Eastern Europe. Go ahead and be cynical about supporting Ukraine. You should know that you are doing it at your own peril.
There are isolationists in America. Many of these people are libertarians or conservatives. Some are authoritarians such as Trumpists. Like Trump, they tend to like Putin. The problem for them is that both Trump and Putin are actually weak. Trump is a loose cannon about to be abandoned by the Republican party after wreaking chaos and destruction in the party. Putin is a deeply corrupt crook in charge of a dying empire with serious demographic problems and now cut off from the global technology chains dominated by the West.
It is truly incomprehensible why Putin started the large-scale attack in February 2022 unless you assume he received false intelligence pointed to by the fact that the chief of the foreign intelligence directory of the FSB was arrested as soon as it became clear Russia would not be able to take Kyiv a few days. Ukraine wasn't going to join NATO. Its accession had already been blocked by France and Germany in 2008. Nor was Ukraine going to join the EU any time soon, either. Putin had taken Crimea as well as organized "an insurgency" in parts of the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts already in 2014. The whole idea that Russia was afraid of Ukrainian militarism is laughable because the Russians also believed it would be possible to take Kyiv in three days and install a puppet. It is likely that Putin was told by the FSB general Sergei Beseda (later arrested) that the Ukrainian military and intelligence services had been so completely compromised that Ukraine would fall like a house of cards and that it would be ripe for taking.
As to whether Russia's full-scale war on Ukraine could've been easily avoided, pray tell how. By giving into all of Russia's demands or what? Putin made it very clear in his essay written in July 2021 that he found Ukraine not to be a real nation at all. In Putin's "deep history" perspective, the Slavic world is a battleground between Catholic Poland & Lithuania and Orthodox Russia (including Belarus and Ukraine). This is the true foundation of Putin's thinking. It's completely delusional, of course, because modern nationhood and religious and civilizational boundaries are a completely different matter.
Putin tolerated a nominally independent Ukraine as a vassal state. But the moment Ukrainian nationalism began to gain momentum, Ukrainian statehood became something that Putin considered necessary to eliminate at an opportune moment.
Ukrainian internal politics may be messy and Ukraine may be corrupt (like Russia - or Romania) but Ukrainians have very clearly demonstrated a distinct national identity and an iron will to defend it against an aggressor.
Thanks to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the Russian military is now bogged down in eastern and southern Ukraine and losing men and materiel at a pace that ensures that Russia will not be a conventional military threat for a very long time.
Russian old school territorial imperialism is a throwback to the 19th century. It has no long-term chance of success because today's world is a high-tech world and cut off from technology chains that are global a country the size of Russia has no hope for the future. But it can do a lot of damage in the short term. That is why crushing sanctions on Russia and massive military aid to Ukraine are absolutely necessary.
I appreciate your insightful comment. I don't consider Romania is threatened in any way by Russia, "thanks" to NATO.
What do you mean "thanks" to?
Also, when Trump was president he threatened that the US would leave NATO.
I don't see why Ukrainians or Belarusians for that matter should forever be forced to live under the Russian yoke. I think speaking out against their defensive struggle from the safety NATO membership is not a particularly honorable thing to do. Germans in particular have made bad choices over the decades by relying overtly on Russian gas.
"Germans in particular have made bad choices over the decades by relying overtly on Russian gas."
Bad choice ? Cheap gas which is needed for the economy. And what are the alternatives? It can only be a bad choice if there is another choice.
Im a noob with all this so please feel free to inform me.
Nuclear power. Japan and South Korea rely heavily on nuclear power.
We have seen now how cheap the Russian gas really is. In actual fact, it's a dagger pointed directly at one's own heart because Russia is willing to weaponize anything. Russians think differently. German leaders think mutual dependence and trade guarantee peace. But it's the other way around: without peace there cannot be trade.