Yes boss, you have catastrophically misunderstood the point.

The point isn’t that people were mean tk Russia and therefore they’re allowed little a invasion as a treat. The point is that they’ve been encircled by hostile nations since the 1990s despite all attempts at overture to them, and that the encirclement continues to get worse. NATO was formed explicitly to take on Russia, and the point of this thought experiment is to try and see this not from an emotional point of view (aka Russia bad) but from a geopolitical point of view of a nation’s leader.

Go back and read my post again. If you were the leader of Russia, knowing that decades of attempted détente didn’t work and that the organization who’s express goal is to break your country apart, and that that organization is doing its best to place troops and nuclear armaments on every inch of your border, would you accept that, or would you perhaps try and prevent that?

We know what happened when the shoe was on the other foot. The US placed nuclear missiles a thousand miles from Moscow on the Black Sea. When the USSR understandably got annoyed and placed nukes in Cuba, the US was seconds away from ending the entire world despite the Soviets repeatedly saying the nukes were defensive response to the Black Sea nukes.

So if we know that the US won’t accept hostile nations arming up on their border, why do we expect others to just kowtow to that?