> Demanding "security guarantees" while undermining Russian security is oxymoronic. 

Talking about security of the largest violator of security in Europe is oxymoronic without the oxy part. Europeans still have Russian soldiers beating their heads with sapper shovels and driving tracked vehicles over people in fairly recent living memory (1991) while "We can repeat it!" remains a popular Russian chant and Russian state TV can't stop fantasizing about nuking major European cities, and we should be worrying about Russian security? Why?

  > It was only when certain Ukrainian leaders decided that they wish to form ties with the west, even if it meant undermining Russian security, that Russia became belligerent against Ukraine.

Completely untrue. The USSR was a totalitarian dictatorship run by people from the upper ranks of military and security services. They lost their grip on the country when they ran it economically into the ground in the late 1980s, but quickly returned to their positions by the mid-1990s by outmaneuvering political parties, big business, criminal gangs and all other challengers of power. By the late 1990s, when Clinton was still in the office and the western world was singing kumbaya about the end of history, the old KGB-military clan had solidified power in Russia and had become openly hostile to European integration and globalization to maintain their privileges in a hermit kingdom. The pivot to antagonism in Russia far predates the Ukraine war, Ukraine's attempt to enter NATO, and many other events. The earliest sign was Russian conduct in the first Chechen war and the genocide against Chechen population in 1994-1996. That was a key moment that showed that nothing had fundamentally changed in Russia, and contributed to the first wave of countries joining NATO to isolate themselves from the prospect of falling victim to the same kind of violence.

Regarding Ukraine specifically, important events that led to the changing perception of Russia were the 2003 Tuzla island conflict, in which Russia violated the territory of Ukraine, along with constant Russian meddling with the internal affairs of Ukraine, peaking with the spectacular poisoning of Ukraine's president Viktor Yushchenko. The before and after pictures speak for themselves: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2009/09/28/ukraine-pm-t...

When a neighboring country violates your territory, intimidates your voters and supports electoral fraud, and poisons your highest representatives, then no shit that you're going to orient more toward the countries that treat you better. Don't throw shit around if you don't want people to turn away from you. Not a very novel idea, is it?

  > The straw that broke the camel's back was when these leaders explicitly and publicly stated that they wanted to join NATO (a military alliance specifically against Russia) ... Talk about idiocy - why would any country knowingly allow another country to undermine its own security, if it can do something about it?

The entire premise that European security cooperation "undermines" Russian security hangs on the expectation that Russia is destined to violate European security, in which case organizations like NATO would be activated to counter it and would present an obstacle. And that such unified European front against Russian aggression would be unsporting and unfair. It's the "burglars dislike neighborhood watch" argument.

Andrei Kozyrev, who was the Russian minister of foreign affairs 1990-1996 and the leading man in rebuilding Russia's post-USSR international relations, offers a different perspective. Instead of having ten little post-breakup Yugoslavias on its borders, mired in endless civil wars that are overspilling crime and refugees into Russia, European security cooperation has instead lead to Russia's neighbors becoming some of the most prosperous, stable and predictible countries on the planet. The Germans, French, British, and Americans have poured billions upon billions into transforming Eastern Europe's rickety people's militias into modern first-world militaries, led by professional civil servants and held to the highest standards of accountability. Solving disagreements through cooperation frameworks like the EU (instead of guns) has become the established norm. Russia has reaped immense benefits without having to pay anything for it. Kozyrev, bluntly, calls this "free-of-charge security for Russia". According to him, Russia has gained spectacularly in terms of security from the cooperation, and it's a total disgrace that the Russian state has spent decades trying to destroy it.