For those with conveniently selective short-term memory, let me remind you. Since February 24, 2022, Russia has launched over 10,000 missiles at Ukraine of nearly every type it possesses: cruise, ballistic, aeroballistic, anti-ship, tactical, and strategic. On top of that, over 50,000 kamikaze drones, mostly Iranian-provided Shahed-136s.. Dozens of massive strikes targeted power plants, substations, combined heat-and-power facilities. The result: an entire country plunged into freezing darkness. The winter of 2022–2023 became a national trial by ice and fire. Ukraine had exhausted its old Soviet air defense stocks. The country stood on the brink of total blackout and societal collapse. Hundreds of civilians were killed in this punitive campaign of “freezing the khokhols to death.” Nearly all thermal and hydroelectric plants were destroyed. One day, amid countless other war crimes, a Russian missile strike deliberately leveled a children’s cancer hospital (!!!!) in central Kyiv. And still, every day and every night, missile and drone strikes rain down across Ukraine, killing people by the dozens, burying them beneath the rubble of their own homes, consumed by fire. How anyone still has the sheer audacity and moral rottenness to open their filthy, festering mouths and talk about how Russia will now deliver "retaliation" to Ukraine -- for the destruction of missile-carrying bombers -- is something I will never be able to comprehend.

Yes, this is definitely the first case in human history that a nation bleeding out under attack has a knife by its throat from yesterday’s biggest friend in need that went bonkers and switched to Al Capone-style racketeering amid war.

Interestingly, NATO has been 130 km away from Saint Petersburg for over 20 years, and it has been totally okay all those years. The half of the Black Sea coastline has been under NATO for decades, and it was totally fine. Russia's Kaliningrad has been surrounded by NATO countries for over 20 years. Sweden and Finland (with over 1,000-km common border with Russia) join NATO, and Putin couldn't care less - no threat at all, in his words. But when it's Ukraine, which NATO refused to accept for like 20 years and doesn't want now, it is a "grave existential threat" to the world's biggest nuclear power, because of which it had to unleash the deadliest European bloodbath since WWII involving the North Korean military. Believe it or not, but it feels like it was never about NATO for Russia.