Bwahahahahahaha, it was the Russians who freed those countries when they dissolved the Warsaw Pact in the first place in the early 1990's
Freed them? Russia had no choice. The US had spent the Soviet Union into the ground and you had to pull-in your horns.
On the conventional level... if we (The West) were going to attack you, we would have done it in the early-to-mid 1990s.
We did not.
That should have been your first clue that you had very little to fear from The West so long as you did not revert to imperialism.
Besides... back then...
You could no longer afford to keep such a force in Eastern Europe and the Peoples of Eastern Europe were nudging you out.
You didn't leave because you wanted to... you left because you HAD to... you could no longer sustain your dying Empire.
And your ill-advised Imperialism in Ukraine has caused many neutrals of the region to join NATO after decades of neutrality.
Not exactly the outcome your bare-chested macho-man Master had in mind before wasting so many Russian lives, was it?
Stalin invaded those countries to use as a buffer against the Germans in the late 1930's but never let them go as he should have in 1945, that was his dumb error as those fleabag countries have nothing to offer to justify keeping them.
And you dumb peasants kowtowed to Uncle Joe and allowed him to do it.
You lack the intellectual vigor and political courage to set up an actual democracy and rule yourselves.
It is clear you have not followed the process from the 1990's onward that destabilized the region from NATO breaking their promise not to expand, to stay in a defensive posture only as their charter states while they help Ukraine fortify areas after 2014 and to show intention of building a NATO base just inside the Ukrainian border thus put Russia into survival situation as there is no longer any time left to defend their airspace thus forced them to invade to remove that existenstional threat.
None of that was "destabilizing"... rather, it served to reassure the peaceful people of those countries that their barbarian Russian masters would not be able to return once they had recovered from the collapse of the Soviet Union....
Given Berlin in 1949 (and 1961) and Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968 nobody blames them for feeling that way.
Insofar as "buffer space" is concerned, those lands are not yours to USE as a "buffer space"... get it?
And the peoples of those lands don't want you there.
This is all just a bull$hit excuse to seize and hold-onto Crimea and create more contiguous land between Russia and Crimea.
Besides... in this day-and-age of hypersonic missiles, the extra land mass doesn't really buy you any appreciable warning time.
You are so freaking ignorant of what has transpired that caused a violent take over a President who was trying to prevent a civil war from starting in the Donbass area which started after the overthrow when Ukraine ablished the Russian speaking majority to stop speaking Russian and when that was resisted started to shell the civilians which generated a separatist group to fight back then Russia began sending food, arms and intelligence to support the strong Russian majority in the Donbass area.
What a load of hor$e$hit... your so-called "Russian population" in those areas are the result of the Soviet Union committing genocide in Ukraine and deporting Cossacks and other Ukrainians by the hundreds-of-thousands and then displacing those populations with Russian-speakers forced to migrate to such regions in order to conjure-up an excuse to hold onto it.
If you had not committed genocide against the Ukrainian people and then displaced them with forcibly-migrated Russian-speakers then their descendants would not be occupying sacred Ukrainian land and there would be no disagreement.
It was Ukraine who started the war when they began shelling the dominant Russian majority in the Donbass area.
Get your a$$e$ out of Ukraine and there will be no problem.
You people used the "
Protectors of the Slavs" bull$hit excuse to mobilize prior to WW1.
You-and-yours are too stupid to learn from history.
Which is why The West continues to oppose you.
Stop it... begin to rule yourselves... learn to become a good neighbor... remain strong but be at-peace... and all will be well.
Until then, you will continue to bleed your unwilling young generation and have to beg for mercenaries and equipment.
Totally unnecessary.
You idiots actually believe the bull$hit that you're being fed by that POS sitting at the top of your food chain.
Damned fools.
