And yes, it was always independent countries courting NATO to be allowed to join (and Georgia sent troops to Afghanistan and Iraq for that, and still was refused - Ukraine had also sent their troops to these NATO missions). There was never any sort of NATO's drive to "encircle" any country ever since the end of the Cold War, the expansion on the side of the organisation has been extremely relucant and we in Poland also had to work hard to be allowed to achieve the accession to the pact. It took over 8 years of asking: https://www.gov.pl/web/national-defence/poland-in-nato-20-years
During your completely irrelevant "one inch" talk, we were still in the Warsaw Pact (named after our capital). As a satellite of the Soviet Union, the country that haven't existed for 30 years, and is now replaced by Ukraine, among others.
And yes, it was always independent countries courting NATO to be allowed to join (and Georgia sent troops to Afghanistan and Iraq for that, and still was refused - Ukraine had also sent their troops to these NATO missions). There was never any sort of NATO's drive to "encircle" any country ever since the end of the Cold War, the expansion on the side of the organisation has been extremely relucant and we in Poland also had to work hard to be allowed to achieve the accession to the pact. It took over 8 years of asking: https://www.gov.pl/web/national-defence/poland-in-nato-20-years
During your completely irrelevant "one inch" talk, we were still in the Warsaw Pact (named after our capital). As a satellite of the Soviet Union, the country that didn't exist for 30 years now, and is replaced by Ukraine, among others.
And yes, it was always independent countries courting NATO to be allowed to join (and Georgia sent troops to Afghanistan and Iraq for that, and still was refused - Ukraine had also sent their troops to these NATO missions). There was never any sort of NATO's drive to "encircle" any country ever since the end of the Cold War, the expansion on the side of the organisation has been extremely relucant and we in Poland also had to work hard to be allowed to achieve the accession to the pact. It took over 8 years of asking: https://www.gov.pl/web/national-defence/poland-in-nato-20-years