Please do wake me when these are, in fact, the same thing.

"NATO has 12 original founding member nation states and from 18 February 1952 to 1 April 2009 it added 16 more member nations."
You should keep the Warsaw Pact in mind when you wake up.

No one forced Lithuania or Estonia to join NATO.

Well, arguably one could argue Russia did . . .

They weren't annexed, I guess. They were sort of 'de-annexed'.

and the previous illegal occupation of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Yeah, those stupid foreigners were just tricked into it.

Were Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia former "Western" countries?

that the Baltics were tricked into joining NATO, when that damn well wasn't the case. They had plenty of reason to seek NATO membership.

'Escaped' would be a better choice.

What on earth does the Warsaw Pact which hasn't existed since 1991 have to do with this?

Now, before anyone thinks I am a hawk, I am not. While I think Putin is wrong, I think we need to stay out.

But Crimea is only Russian speaking because Stalin, et al, undertook a concerted effort to ethnically cleanse the area and literally starve the native Ukrainians to death.

They then exported native Russians to Crimea.

This invasion has been going on for 60 years.

The original inhabitants of Crimea were actually the Greeks, who were conquered by the Tatars who then colonized the peninsula and used it as the center of their slaving empire until Russia invaded and destroyed the Khanate in the 1700's (after the Khanate had launched a massive slaving expedition into Russia that killed or claimed over 200,000 people).

After exterminating the Khanate, the Russian empire repopulated the mainland portion of their new territory (calling it Novorossia) with a mix of Russian and Ukrainian immigrants. The peninsula itself was primarily populated by the Tatars who had survived the invasion, and a mix of the original Greek population and Russian colonists. When the Soviet Union was formed, Crimea was originally granted the status of an autonomous socialist republic because it was so demographically different than the mainland it was connected to. Crimea did not gain a substantial population of ethnic Ukrainians until the 1920's, when many mainland Ukranians fled there while trying to escape the Holomodor. The majority of the Ukrainian population on the peninsula results from growth after WW2, when the Crimea was handed over to Ukraine and fell under its rule.

In 1863, there were actually more Bulgarians living in Crimea than Ukrainians (around 7000 Ukrainians, vs about 17,000 Bulgarians). In the 1923 census, there were so few Ukranians living there that they didn't even get a line item. By 1939, they were about 10% of the population, and their numbers just increased from there.