NATO expansion is not the primary cause of U.S.-Russia tensions because Putin initially wanted to join NATO (2000), said Ukraine should join NATO without objection, and as recently as 2010 at the Lisbon NATO summit, President Medvedev said 'All of our animosity with NATO is over.' The real threat Putin fears is democratic expansion, not NATO expansion, because democracy in Ukraine demonstrates to Russians that they could have elected leaders rather than autocrats, which undermines Putin's domestic narrative that Russia is a separate civilization fundamentally different from the decadent West.