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Let's not just continue to adhere to the silly "we're the good guys, they're the bad guys" mentality that you seem to have in the NATO/Russia debate.

At any rate Karpatsky, I do also want to say that I appreciate your time in responding to my posts; our relations may not always be the most cordial, but I always appreciate having an interesting discussion.

Since dead0 and Kalwejt have already responded to your post, I want to focus on this in particular because I think it is at the core of the issue, and if it can't be overcome there is little value to be had in further discussion. "Good guys-bad guys" is clearly an oversimplification. Like Kalwejt, I am not an unquestioning supporter of US foreign policy. I do not hold that US foreign policy makers always make good decisions, nor even that they never make unethical decisions. However, broadly speaking, and especially clearly when talking about NATO and Russia, it is true. Whether it is truly 'benevolent' or not is irrelevant and not really answerable (there are both internationalists and primalists in the US foreign policy establishment) - empirically, US influence advances human rights, rule of law, democracy, and anti-corruption.

Russian influence, by contrast, advances corruption, patronage, repression, and hyper-capitalist oligarchy.  Again, whether it is 'malevolent' is an irrelevant and ideological question - Russian foreign policy makers tend to be nationalists or Eurasianists, neither of which consider any of these things particularly important. This is not at all to claim that there is no corruption, patronage, repression, hypercapitalism, or oligarchy in the United States or its allies, but it is not at all comparable to the situation in Russia and its allies. In saying this, I am not relying on anything which could be called 'western propaganda' by any stretch. I have lived for years in Ukraine. I had the misfortune to live for a few years in Russia. I have met democrats and nationalists from both countries. I have relatives and friends who have participated in events like Euromaidan, and who have fought and died in the Donbass. I have heard at length the financial consequences for ordinary people of the war in Ukraine and of sanctions in Russia. I have been to grocery stores with no milk and thirty-dollar apples. I have met and listened to talks by American, Russian, and Ukrainian policymakers. I have nearly been run over by sports cars and limousines with blue sirens on top of them. I have paid bribes to policemen. I have seen protesters beaten and arrested. And I have for years on end listened to people like you in America or on the internet tell me that they know better what is right for these people.

I am not saying this to tell you you should just shut up and listen to me, but to put in perspective on what grounds I believe what you seem to see as naivety. To be honest, I do simply ignore most people who have the views you do, because to draw a moral equivalence between these two systems requires deep ignorance and misinformation about empirical reality. I understand that this is a difficult thing to discern from afar, because on top of the US media being extremely uninterested in foreign policy in general, the Russian government has gone to great lengths to spread misinformation, and it is clear from the tropes you use to discuss these issues that you are a victim of these efforts. This is neither surprising nor your fault - these efforts have unfortunately been quite successful in left-wing circles because of the preexistence of rightful criticism of US policy in other areas. I myself was banned from /r/LSC, on which I used to be an active participant, for pushing back on disinformation lines regarding a Ukrainian political event which I had been to. I'm not going to tell you for obvious reasons that you should go spend a few years in Russia and Ukraine, although that would be an extremely effective way to rid you of your current opinion. Instead, I would just ask you to take a step back from your ideological sources and shortcuts, even if you think they are reliable in other cases, and take a new view at what is happening and what outcome you actually think is best.