Russia is rightly defending themselves against this. There was a verbal promise made to Putin that there would be no NATO expansion in Europe against the East and thus against Russia – which has been shamefully broken. This is the crux of it and how we discuss it with normies. This falls squarely on Biden and his cronies.
Here is what was said at the conference:
The far-reaching assurances were made in Washington by the American Secretary of State ‘that we are not willing and there is no intention in Europe to extend NATO’s defence area further east’.“
More on the promise by NATO not to expand eastward
U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu). The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels.