>>45786
>So if they'd let Ukraine into NATO, that would shut down this whole thing
I think you are getting this wrong. As I see it, it is the risk of Ukraine becoming another Baltic-like slut for yank rockets that underlies this issue since 2014
Let's recap: US encouraged, funded, and abetted a coup which replaced a corrupt pro-russia govt with another corrupt, jewish, histerically anti-russia and sluttily pro-anything-that-is-anti-russia. One of the intended goals of this regime-change op was to kick the russian navy out of crimea where they had leased a base for a long time, and thus, to a reasonable degree, out of the black sea. Preempting that, while ukraine remained in disorder, russia stepped in with a referendum for crimea, a territory which had been "gifted" to the UkrSSR by the Soviet leader Khruschev (who IIRC was from the ukraine himself), to re-join the motherland, which they took with both hands. This was easy, no one was killed, plenty of ukrainian militaries defected, people from elsewhere in the country left for or returned to crimea. Obongo was livid, prospects of converting sebastopol into a USN base suddenly shelved.
Crimea was not alone in rejecting the new anti-russia project. In general, anti vs pro-russia sentiment followed a gradient from the westernmost patch (another region given to the UkrSSR by Soviets, although in this case not a historically russian territory as can be seen by the lower Orthodoxy/Catholicism ratio) being the most anti, towards the east/south, being the most pro. And indeed the eastern provinces of donetsk and lugansk were committed enough to take up arms, leading to the donbass civil war. This civil war was stopped with the signing of the Minsk accord, to which western european countries like germany lent authority. This accord required the central govt of ukraine to reform into a federative system and to grant the donbass provinces limited autonomy.
But the govt of ukraine, with silent blessing from usa/nato, has all but repudiated the agreement it signed. Instead of fulfilling the agreement it has passed laws against its sizable russian-speaking population, politicians which are insufficiently anti-russia are held in indefinite house arrest, others die in front of their homes victims of "stray bullets", opposition media is summarily closed... but, well, it also holds fag parades now and publishes children books parroting the western-style slogans such as racial "diversity" (meaning mixture), and most importantly it invited us/uk militaries, bought weapons from them and almost demanded to be allowed to suck NATO's gock. (So you can see that the Ukrainian government well deserves to be invited to USA's online Summit of Propaganda, unlike such obviously "undemocratic" shitholes like Russia or Hungary ;) Furthermore this year the ukraine govt has twice set up large-scale military deployments in the vicinity of donbass. In both cases (first in march/april and then now) russia responded with similar deployments near its own borders. In both cases the western and westernist MSM run around screaming about the imminent invasion of mongol barbarians, as they have done for years, completely ignoring that Ukraine was deploying forces towards donbass disregarding the Minsk aggreement.
So, going back to the starting point, in my opinion "letting Ukraine into NATO" (the legal formality) would not "shut down" anything by itself, if anything, it would be the ink-on-paper conclusion of the regime-change project started in 2014. But that is precisely the security threat that concerns russia, so I think that if effective action is undertaken to expand nato into ukraine, russia would try to prevent it
>Ukraine wouldn't be threatened anymore.
It is amusing this kind of thinking that assumes and internalizes US dominance wherever. Ukraine wouldn't be threatened if she wouldn't threaten her neighbor either
>US can only do ... little in practice.
Of course US could theoretically do a lot, but Ukraine is hardly a central concern for US. It is just a juicy nice-to-have if it can be termina