Serbia has been building up its military and has declared its intention to unite with Serbs living in other countries while also taking an authoritarian turn and having friendly relations with Russia and China.
Eastern European countries were brought and kept in the Warsaw pact by force. These countries wanted to join NATO because they were afraid Russia would invade them.
Before many of them joined NATO, Russia was already violently intervening in its neighbors.
Poland threatened to develop nuclear weapons to defend itself, and got involved in U.S. politics to push for it joining NATO.
“A Russian court on Monday denied relief to a U.S. citizen serving 12 years in a penal colony for treason in connection with a $51.80 donation she made, while in the U.S., to a pro-Ukraine charity.
Ksenia Karelina, who is also a Russian citizen, was arrested in January during a trip to visit her 90-year-old grandmother and other family members in Yekaterinburg, Russia. She immigrated to the U.S. in 2012 and became a citizen in 2021.
Trouble for Karelina, 33, began shortly after landing in Russia, where the Federal Security Service (FSB) flagged her after learning she had a U.S. passport. The agency interrogated her, took her cell phone—on which the FSB discovered her 2022 donation to Razom, a charity dedicated to “actively contributing to the establishment of a secure, prosperous, and democratic Ukraine”—and ultimately arrested her for “petty hooliganism,” which was later ratcheted up to treason. Her prosecution is part of a larger Russian crackdown on alleged treason that is unprecedented even by the country’s illiberal standards.”