I have no regional experience with the tiny backwater corner of the world known as "the Baltics"....but I absolutely understand how my country exerts influence in numerous larger, more important places, with even more significant risks.....and it's by heavily using the tools that I mentioned. I'm not willing to give our government the benefit of the doubt, given our extensive list of malevolent priors. If you are saying there was overwhelming domestic support for NATO, okay, but I'd consider that an exception, not a norm.

Yes, I can see that you have no regional experience, and pinning everything on the US is an obvious attempt to fill the gap with what you have. But you're wrong. These attitudes were the norm, not an exception. Hungary, for example, held a referendum in 1997 and 85.33% of voters expressed support for joining NATO. The 1956 Hungarian revolution and its violent suppression by Soviet soldiers, who killed 3000 civilians, did far more to shape the desire to join NATO than anything the US ever did. It is extremely provincial and backwaterish to fall back on US-centric explanations for everything that has happened in Europe.

  Re: 1991 South Ossetia War. Why is it ok for the Georgians to secede from the Soviet Union but not ok for the South Ossetians to secede from Georgia? Why is it morally good for the US to arm the Ukrainians, who feel aggrieved, but not moral for Russia to arm the South Ossetians, who feel aggrieved?

As the USSR collapsed, the Soviet central government employed a strategy of inflaming ethnic divisions to weaken independence movements. Their strategy aimed not to support the separatist groups, but to create instability in Soviet republics and disrupt their ability to form independent states by creating frozen conflicts: ongoing, unresolved issues that would drain the resources and attention of the newly independent states and prevent them from fully consolidating their sovereignty. This strategy saw its widest successes in Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Nagorno-Karabakh, but attempts that ultimately failed were made in many other places too. We saw exactly the same strategy again in Ukraine, when unmarked Russian forces pretended to be local separatists and declared the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics.

Transnistria, South Ossetia, etc remain internationally unrecognized - even by Russian allies like Belarus - because they represent manufactured conflicts rather than genuine independence movements.