As far as I know, there are no Nukes in the Baltic states. About trusting Russia, and the question about who we can trust..
Well, I don't see why anyone would attack *Russia*. I just don't see it happening. There would be simply nothing to gain by it, starting to fight a huge war with a huge country. Russia on the other hand seems to be keen to annex smaller nations and I see the small Baltic countries' concerns as very legitimate.
So I ask again:
Do they not have the right to seek the defense available? Should they instead just do nothing and be completely at Russia's mercy?
You can ask again. No one says that small countries have no right to defense. But when you say "seek the defense available", that kind of gives away the real meaning of the proposal: not that a country should defend itself, but that another, much larger entity should defend it. We can look back to Korea and Vietnam to talk about such "defense".
But the real objection remains - you have dismissed Russian concerns, by saying there is nothing to gain by attacking Russia. This does not address those concerns at all. The real motives of the larger entities: the US and NATO, vis-a-vis Russia, is about economic, rather than political dominance, and the maintenance of a continuous flow of purchase of arms, with or without war. But although you have considerable sympathy with Russia's border states (and nobody doubts this) and a clear awareness of their own history of being occupied and controlled by one power or another, you display no awareness of Russia's having been occupied, its people murdered, scorched earth policies in both the 19th century under Napoleon and the 20th century under the Nazis. The accounts are many and as fully horrifying as those of the other states, yet you have shown no ability to think about how that history might motivate Russians to be suspicious of an alliance created specifically against them, and then, after the fall of the Soviet Union and extreme willingness of Russians to reject war and embrace friendship with the West, that alliance against them was expanded, as member after member of what had been part of the Warsaw Pact effectively turned its guns in the opposite direction, and this alliance creeping right up to Russia's borders. If you had been, for instance, in Naro-Fominsk, which is pretty darn close to Moscow itself when it was occupied (I read a survivor's account, an entire book), you might see how hostile forces pressing on Russia would be seen as threatening, despite your assurances. You don't heed to tell me about the reverse; I am fully aware of it, and why Russia's neighbors don't want to see a new Russian Empire. I'm just really not convinced that you get the Russian side. I think it was bad that Russia went into the Crimea. I think the whole separatist movement in the Donbass is bad. But I can see the other side, the two decades preceding these things that led to this, the forces of both Russia AND the West vying to influence the Ukraine, and when it really began to look like Ukraine could really become a US puppet state, I could see why Russians would want to secure the Black Sea. I don't say that justifies everything, and I certainly agree that Yanukovich was serving Russia's interests, and thought what he did to Timoshenko was terrible ( among many other things) but I do say that thinking that the US plutocracy wasn't trying to get its own hooks into the Ukrainian government is naive in the extreme.
You can reassure us that "nobody has anything to gain, starting to fight a huge war with a huge country". No one had anything to gain in 1963, either, but it almost came to nuclear war. You have to be able to look at both sides, not dismissing anyone's concerns, to hope to begin to have a fair perspective. There are two or more sides to any controversy, and the most convincing argument is the one that fairly expresses all sides.