(March 6, 2025 at 2:11 am)TheWhiteMarten Wrote: Adding Ukraine to NATO only reduces the distance to Moscow by about 100 miles;
Again, Putin invaded Ukraine because he's a dictator who wants to fulfill his commitment to restoring the Russian and Soviet empires. That's why he devastated Chechnya, then in 2008 he invaded Georgia. This was followed by the massacre of over 500,000 people in Syria in 2012.
Ukraine was not only never a NATO member, but Putin even rejected a deal that would satisfy Russia's demand that Ukraine stay out of NATO and then invaded Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin's chief envoy on Ukraine told the Russian leader as the war began that he had struck a provisional deal with Kyiv that would satisfy Russia's demand that Ukraine stay out of NATO, opens new tab, but Putin rejected it and pressed ahead with his military campaign, according to three people close to the Russian leadership.
The Ukrainian-born envoy, Dmitry Kozak, told Putin , opens new tabthat he believed the deal he had hammered out removed the need for Russia to pursue a large-scale occupation of Ukraine, opens new tab, according to these sources. Kozak's recommendation to Putin to adopt the deal is being reported by Reuters for the first time.
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacif...022-09-14/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
