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I didn't say caring about countries outside your border is paranoia. It would be contradictory with helping Ukraine, wouldn't it?
But if "caring about countries outside your border" means invading other countries and expanding your own territory even though your country is already the largest in the world, then the only conclusion is that Russia will have to conquer the entire world to feel safe.
Russia is already the country the most heavily armed with nuclear weapons ; and Ukraine or not the US can erase Russia from the map, so Ukraine can be part of NATO without any change in the threat level for Russia.
Respectfully, this is silly, the border between Ukraine and Russia is (or was) nearly 2,000 km and that's a lot of extra airspace to cover if you're trying to defend against a first strike on either your nuclear assets or your command and control assets. Ukraine also had, I think, the largest non-Russian army in Europe, which meant adding them to NATO represented a much larger conventional threat.
I grant the "nuclear ace in the hole" that Russia has currently is a nice one to have, but will they have it forever? If the US gets a missile defense shield some Russian nuclear weapons might become unreliable as a deterrent.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, I don't think Russia cares about Ukraine merely because of the conventional threat, but it's not serious to say "I have nukes, so my largest and best-armed European neighbor joining a de facto hostile military alliance poses zero threat to my national security." Of course it does. Unless you're suggesting that nuclear-armed states can have no conventional threats at all – in which case neither China or Russia pose a threat to the United States and nothing happening in Ukraine can reasonably bother England or France.
You didn't reply to the strongest point of my message, where I argue that your logic logically implies that Russia will never be safe until it controls the entire world (and you don't seem to intend to do anything to avoid it)
That's like saying because the United States objected to nuclear weapons in Cuba, they logically will blockade every country in the world until nuclear weapons are removed from them.
Obviously the presence of a peer competitor anywhere in the world does make you less safe, but if you can't predict that great powers treat their near environs differently than distant ones – and will find some security situations much more tolerable than others – I dunno what to tell you.
Although probably both Vladimir Putin and JD Vance are Motte posters, I am neither, and thus my options for doing anything as regards Russia are pretty much nonexistent.
No, not at all. It would only work this way if the US were expanding their borders in the process (as Russia did with Crimea and wants to do with the four oblasts). Because when you expand your border they actually get closer from the threat, which justifies another war where you expand them further.
If Russia is so terrified with having its territory invaded, then the first step should be not to annex Crimea and Mariupol, because with their coast they provide a very sweet invasion spot, eg from Turkey.
Russia's strategy up until the 2014 revolution was not expanding their borders (although Kiev was Russia from 1686 to 1991!), but in exercising soft power and diplomacy in Ukraine. They lost the soft war, so had to settle for a hard one.
No they "had to" nothing. The best way to ensure security is to build trust with your neighboors and not to sponsor corrupted autocratic governments
The US and Europe sponsored color revolutions which brought "corrupted autocratic governments" to power in Ukraine in 2004 and 2014.
No those governments weren't autocratic given that the power has swiftly switched hands. Sure they were and are still corrupt, but the corruption level is continuously decreasing since those revolutions.
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