There are some interesting tweets in there. I don't quite understand some of them.
There's these:
https://twitter.com/shustry/status/1491440754690256897
https://twitter.com/shustry/status/1491442438069964800
"The goal of massing troops is not to invade but to put a lot of fear into the West to force everyone on this side to agree."
How would this benefit Putin?
"The source also added Putin has never been more isolated, very few people speak to him now. the world inside his head is only his own."
I don't know what that means either.
I really wish there was an easy way to embed tweets here like we embed youtube videos.
I think the first just means that Russia wants to scare Ukraine and NATO into thinking there will be an invasion so that they have much greater leverage for negotiations. Already the Ukrainian ambassador to the UK said they are considering to drop their plans to join NATO in order to avoid war. It's very likely what is actually happening, though I'm not sure this "insider" knows much.
Interesting. If their goal is to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO by agreeing to not invade I'm not sure how that yields a benefit for Russia since the purpose of NATO is preventing invasions.
It would be like some crazy guy threatening to murder a girl if she calls the police. But if she agrees to not call the police then he'll leave. Sort of makes you wonder why he even bothered. Unless he wants everyone to think he's insane.
But that's not the point of NATO...
I don't know if you watched it but after Putin met Macron he very specifically warned that if Ukraine joined NATO and then tried to take back Crimea, then the NATO countries would be dragged into a war with Russia. Russia has repeatedly warned Ukraine against joining NATO. Their major goals is to keep Ukraine out of NATO and the Crimea matter to be settled. A secondary goal would be to annex Donetsk probably but that's far more distant and unrealistic than the other two and I don't think it's the main thing they want to pursue. NATO means US influence and military bases in the area. That's the biggest thing that Russia does not want.
I'm looking at the NATO articles from what I can tell it looks like that's exactly the point of NATO. A bunch of countries close to Russia are afraid of Russia invading them, a fear which is completely rational btw, so they have a mutual defense pact. Military bases and US influence comes with the territory of such an agreement. Seems to me that the best way to stop the expansion of NATO would be for Russia to stop invading other countries.
NATO is for "preventing invasions" about as much as bath salts are for your bath... Like, yeah, that's the idea on the label but that's not the point...
Also I... Think you're kind of confused because NATO was created by a few western countries and later dominated by the US and let's just say neither the US nor Canada are anywhere close to Russia, and most of the original treaty countries were never in any real risk of invasion by the USSR and didn't share any borders. In fact Canada and the US are about as far from Russia as they can be. Greece is in NATO too. I can assure you that absolutely nobody in Greece has ever seriously had the concern that Russia may invade us. NATO was a cold war invention of the US, the point of which was to create a "western bloc" to counter the USSR primarily and serve the foreign policy interests of the US more broadly. The USSR had its own "NATO" in response, the Warsaw pact.
As for the invading other countries part, how common do you think what you are describing is? Russia has not done something like what you are describing to anyone besides Ukraine for a long time, and what is often missed regarding Ukraine is that a big part of the conflict is essentially a civil irredentist conflict between ethnic groups within Ukraine, like the Chechen wars in Russia or the troubles in Ireland. You're making it seem like Russia just keeps invading neighboring countries and is trying to take over everyone when it's just not in a position to do that neither really intending to, barring a few specific long standing disputes involving Russian populations in other places and occasionally sending troops to other places at the request of allied countries, like in Syria. Russia tries to exert influence a lot but not typically by invading other places, it's just not something that common.
As for the NATO thing, both Greece and Turkey are in NATO. And yet Turkey disputes some Greek islands, and is also occupying part of Cyprus. You probably don't know it but a couple years ago many people were worried there would be some sort of incident between Greece and Turkey which could escalate to war, kind of similar to the current stand off in Ukraine. But neither Turkey nor Greece are concerned about a Russian invasion. So you have countries within NATO (supposedly to protect member states from invasions by Russia, right?) that are not threatened at all by Russia, and are instead primarily threatened by other countries within NATO. And obviously NATO did not freak out about any of this nearly as much as it's freaking out about a non-NATO country, where a large component of the issue is essentially a civil conflict between ethnic groups. Does any of this sound normal to you?