re: Is Henry Kissinger's reason for Russian invasion of Ukraine wrong?

In Europe, the northern coastal plains take up a large area that is difficult to defend and prone to sweeping mechanized army advances. The narrowest choke point in this coastal plain is in Germany, near the historic border of East and West Germany. The further East one goes from there, the wider this plain becomes, making it increasingly less defensible. At that point, the only thing which protects the Russian interior from invasion is time, logistics, and weather.

Every time NATO has expanded eastward from West Germany, it has made Russia’s interior more and more difficult to defend by having it placed around a wider potential front with a starting point closer to that heartland. Finland and The Ukraine are necessary buffers because an invasion into Russia from those points are so close to the Russian heartland, and along such difficult to defend terrain, that an adequate defense would be nearly impossible. A large scale invasion force from Finland could besiege St. Petersburg on the first day while simultaneously severing communications between the Russian government and their nuclear arsenal on the Cola Peninsula, essentially eliminating the option of mutually assured destruction.

A full scale invasion launched from The Ukraine could reach the Kremlin in just a couple days, advancing along wide, flat, open land. Russia cannot adequately defend itself from full-scale invasions launched from either of those locations. Estonia is precarious enough as it is.

As such, it is not shocking that Russia is acting how it is. NATO aligned Finland and Ukraine would be orders of magnitude more dangerous for Russia than a nuclear soviet-aligned Cuba was for America in the 1960’s.