It is obscene that we are allying with a colonial genocidal racist regime and criminalising a national liberation movement. The UK has so much blood on its hands in the Palestine Holocaust .
NATO expansion was a provocation. After the Cold War ended, the original rationale for the alliance—containing the Soviet Union— didn't apply, so expanding Eastern was clearly an aggressive move to exploit a weakened Russia as Kissinger quite honestly explained in the PBS interview.
From Russia’s perspective, this expansion was a threat. It's faced multiple invasions from the West: Napoleon, the Nazis etc and clearly NATO’s movement toward its borders, the deployment of missile defense systems in Eastern Europe, and Western support for the ousting of allied governments would be seen as existential threats.
Their reaction is rooted in history and security logic.
I'm saying this again because a moderator deleted my comment for "Russian propaganda". The US promised the USSR in the early 1990s that it would not expand Eastward past Germany. It lied and expanded up to the Russian border.
After expanding NATO eastward, the U.S. deployed anti ballistic missile defense systems in Poland and Romania further provoking Russia in its own backyard.
There was no promise of NATO expansion. Gorbachev himself had said there was no such promise.
This is categorically not true. Former ambassador to the Soviet Union James Matlock confirmed that the US gave assurances to Gorbachev when he was General Secretary that if Germany united NATO would not move further eastward. Here is the interview from 1994 (11 minutes 46 seconds
The UK has been sliding into authoritarianism for decades and it's starting to have real world effects on normal people who aren't activists, journalists or protestors.
I'd like to think this would be the rallying cry for Joe public but realistically...
The UK has been deep into the Israel project since the beginning.
From the Balfour declaration to taking over Palestine after WW1 to crushing the Palestinian uprising in the 1930s to allowing emigration to finally washing its hand of Palestine in 1947 when things got too tricky.
As in the catastrophic partition of India, the UK created the conditions for chaos and then walked away whistling.
My heart lifted when I misread it as gets lifetime sentence. Oh well. Right wing grifting pays.