Western politicians often claim that the Russian military operation in Ukraine was “unprovoked”, the New York Times’ favourite adjective to describe the Ukrainian War. The war in Ukraine, they say, must be entirely blamed on Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. According to this narrative, the Russian leader is a “murderous dictator” who desires to resuscitate the defunct Soviet Empire and may even seek to subjugate other European countries to achieve this goal. As noted by the editorial of British tabloid The Sun, ‘it is paramount, as in 1939, that the free peoples of the West defeat this hideous new evil, this Hitler for our times’.[1]
However, a more judicious consideration of the Ukrainian crisis reveals that there are two sides to this story, only one of which is being told. On September 9, 2023, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg committed a gaff, meaning that he accidentally revealed the truth. In testimony to the European Union Parliament, Stoltenberg made clear that it was America’s relentless push to enlarge NATO to Ukraine that was the primary cause of the war and it continues to this day. Here are Stoltenberg’s deeply revealing words:
The background was that President Putin declared in autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition not to invite Ukraine. Of course, we didn’t sign that. The Opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. … We rejected that. So, he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite”.[2]
For many weeks prior to the Russian invasion, on 24 February 2022, U.S. President Joseph Biden, his Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, and Secretary of State, Antony Blinken were telling the world that the war in Ukraine was imminent.[3] This was a classic example of warmongering that inevitably increases the likelihood of war. The Biden administration so often repeated this prediction that everyone started to believe that war was inevitable.
President Biden’s irresponsible talk of an imminent Russian attack elevated tensions and was not conducive to achieving a diplomatic resolution of the conflict. More importantly, his statements effectively painted the Russian President into a corner: if he were to invade, he would prove Biden right, but if he ordered the withdrawal of the Russian troops, Putin would then be described as weak, and it would adversely affect his standing in the volatile domestic Russian political arena.[4]
The leading globalist organisation in the U.S. is known as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a think-tank specialising in U.S. foreign policy and international relations. Founded in 1921, CFR is based in New York City, with an additional office in Washington, DC. President Biden has been praised by CFR for his utterly disastrous response to the events that escalated between Russia and Ukraine. This agency fully supports the U.N. and NATO and is quite outspoken in its condemnation of Putin and Russia. The agency goes so far as to plan a “post-Putin Russia”, encouraging the development of “emergency response plans” with NATO to prevent what it calls the “threat of right-wing nationalism”.[5]
According to the prevailing Western narrative, President Putin is an insatiable expansionist who invaded Ukraine as unprovoked act of military expansion. ‘Putin allegedly mistaking himself for Peter the Great, invaded Ukraine to recreate the Russian Empire.’ [6] While this narrative entirely blames the Russian leader for the war in Ukraine, the underlying cause of the present conflict lies not in unbridled Russian expansionism, but primarily in a 30-year history of Western provocations directed at Russia, which began during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and continued until the outbreak of the war.
These Western provocations apparently put Russia in an untenable situation. In his insightful book How the West Brought War to Ukraine, Dr Benjamin Abelow makes these important considerations:
Had the United States not pushed NATO to the border of Russia; not deployed nuclear-capable missile launch systems in Romania and planned them for Poland and perhaps elsewhere as well; not contributed to the overthrown of the democratically elected Ukrainian government in 2014; not abrogated the ABM treaty and then the intermediate-range nuclear missile treaty, and then disregarded Russian attempts to negotiate a bilateral moratorium on deployments; not conducted live-fire exercises with rockets in Estonia to practice striking targets inside Russia; not coordinated a massive 32-nation military training exercise near Russian territory; not intertwined the U.S. military with that of Ukraine; etc. etc. etc. – had the United States and its NATO allies not done these things, the war in Ukraine probably would not have taken place. And even that is not the end of it. The U.S. government, through its words and actions, may have led Ukrainian leaders, and the Ukrainian people, to adopt intransigent positions toward Russia. Instead of pressing and supporting a negotiated peace in the Donbas between Kiev and pro-Russian autonomists, the United States encouraged strongly nationalist forces in Ukraine. It purred weapons into Ukraine, stepped up military integration and training with the Ukrainian military, refused to renounce plans to incorporate Ukraine into NATO, and may have given the impression to the Ukrainian leaders and people that it might directly go to war with Russia on Ukraine’s behalf.[7]
Jeffrey D. Sachs is a university professor and director of the Centre for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He is also president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the U.N. Broadband Commission for Development. Professor Sachs has been an adviser to three United Nations secretaries-general. According to him,
The bloodshed was caused by long-standing Western arrogance and NATO expansion. The West could easily have prevented the catastrophic Ukraine conflict, which had been brewing for many years, by abandoning its many escalatory policies including NATO expansion.[8]
President Putin made one last attempt at diplomacy at the end of 2021, tabling a draft U.S.-NATO Security Agreement to forestall the war. The core of the draft agreement ‘was an end of NATO enlargement and removal of U.S. missiles near Russia’.[9] The West could have easily ended the conflict early on, as Moscow and Kiev had largely worked out a peace deal during talks in Turkey, which revolved around Ukraine’s neutrality. Russia’s security concerns “were valid and the basis for negotiation”, Professor Sachs says. However, as he also points out,
Biden rejected negotiations out of a combination of arrogance, hawkishness and profound miscalculation. NATO maintained its position that NATO would not negotiate with Russia regarding NATO enlargement, that in effect, NATO enlargement was none of Russia’s business.[10]
Why is Ukraine deemed to be so important for the Russians?
First of all, modern Russia as a nation finds its origins in Kievan Rus, founded in the ninth century with its first capital in Novgorod, then in Kiev. The Russian Orthodox religion spread from Ukraine, and even celebrated anti-communist dissidents like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn insisted that Ukraine is an integral part of Russia. Indeed, for 500 years it was.[11] Hence, Henry Kissinger, who served as United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, thought that Ukraine “should not be allowed to join NATO”.[12] As Kissinger once pointed out,
The West must understand that, to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country. Russian history began with Kievan-Rus. The Russian religion spread from there. Ukraine has been part of Russia for centuries. The Russian Black Sea Fleet – Russia’s means of projecting power in the Mediterranean – is based in Sevastopol, Crimea (with Ukraine’s longtime agreement).[13]
In 1991, Ukraine’s insistence on independence precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union.[14] With 46 million people, Ukraine is the largest of the states that had split away from the Russian Federation, in 1991. About half of the Ukrainians speak Russian.[15] One of the conflicting points about secession was Crimea’s political status, because two-thirds of its 2.4 million inhabitants are ethnically Russian. The territory, a peninsula jutting out into the Black Sea, has been part of Russia since 1783. It was transferred to Ukraine by then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1954, at a time when no one would imagine that the Soviet Union would ever disappear.[16] President Putin complains about what he calls the Soviet policy of dismembering Russia. This policy caused Russia to lose Crimea, which, in his words, ‘we won from the Turks, and the Baltic States, where the Russian-speaking population was mistreated.’[17]
During the World War II, Khrushchev served at the Ukrainian front, but once the war ended, he took up his old job again of running the Communist Party in Kiev.[18] It was this Soviet leader who, in 1954, arbitrarily transferred Crimea (Russian from 1783 until then) to Ukraine. This was at his time an administrative move, which shifted control of the area from one region of the Soviet Union to another, with the aim of improving its governance.[19] According to Nina Khrushcheva, a professor of international affairs and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Jeffrey Tayler, a contributing editor at The Atlantic,
When in 1954 Khrushchev transferred Crimea from Russia to Ukraine, he hoped only to improve the peninsula’s governance. At the time, Ukrainians hardly noticed. Even Khrushchev’s old daughter Rada, who traveled with her father surveying the area before the transfer, remembered, after the Crimea annexation in 2014, that “At the time they didn’t even want Crimea. Apart from historians, few Ukrainians cared about it as the possible original baptismal place of Kievan Rus or considered it to be theirs.” Over decades, however, the peninsula did come to represent Ukraine’s competitive spirit with the Russians.[20]
The late American diplomat, George Kennan, in a 1998 interview given shortly after the U.S. Senate had approved the first round of NATO expansion in Eastern Europe, warned that this would result in a ‘new Cold War, probably ending in a hot one’.[21] He predicted that NATO expansion would inevitably provoke a military crisis, after which the proponents of NATO expansion would say that ‘we always told you that is how the Russians are’.[22] ‘I think it is a strategic mistake. There is no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anyone else’, Kennan admonished.[23]
Unfortunately, however, since the mid-1990s, successive U.S. administrations have regularly pushed for NATO expansion towards the Russian border.[24] The story begins in 1990 when, as the Soviet Union was coming to an end, Western leaders sought to reunify East and West Germany under the auspices of NATO. This required Moscow to agree to remove its roughly 400,000 troops from East Germany. To appease Moscow, Western leaders communicated the view that NATO would not expand eastward toward the Russian border.[25]
The first round of NATO enlargement in the European continent occurred in 1999. It brought into NATO the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. The second round, in 2004, included Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. In April 2008, a summit held in Bucharest flagged the possible NATO membership of Georgia and Ukraine, which the Russians considered to be a “direct threat” to them.[26] However, in a June 2021 meeting in Brussels, NATO reaffirmed its commitment: ‘We reiterate the decision made at the 2008 Bucharest Summit that Ukraine will become a member of the Alliance’.[27] According to Dr Abelow,
Incrementally, in steps small and large, the West has disregarded Russia’s reasonable security concerns, considering them irrelevant, stoking Russian concerns about encirclement and invasion. At the same time, The United States and its European allies have implied that a rational actor would be assuaged by the West’s statements of benign intention: that the weapons, training, and interoperability exercise, not matter who provocative, power, or close to Russia’s borders, are purely defensive and not be feared. I many instances, Western leaders, especially from the United States, have actively disrespected Mr. Putin, sometimes insulting him to his face.[28]
In late 2013 and early 2014, anti-government protests took place in Kiev’s Independence Square. These protests, which were supported by the U.S. government, were primarily orchestrated by violent provocateurs attempting to overthrow a democratically elected, pro-Russian president. In December 2013, Senator John McCain, then a leading Republican voice on U.S. foreign policy, told leaders of the Ukrainian opposition camped on Kiev’s main square that “Ukraine’s destiny lays in Europe”.[29] When asked by CNN host Candy Crowley, on December 15, 2013, whether it was a good idea to “take Russia on”, Senator McCain replied:
There’s no doubt that Ukraine is of vital importance to Putin. I think it was [Henry] Kissinger, I’m not sure, who said that Russia, without Ukraine it’s an eastern power, with Ukraine it’s a western power. This is the beginning of Russia, right here in Kiev. So Putin views it as most highly important and he has put pressure on Ukrainians … The word is very clear that he has made certain threats. Whether he would carry them through I don’t know.[30]
These anti-government protests culminated in a coup in February 2014, in which Ukrainian ultranationalists seized government buildings and forced the democratically elected president to flee the country.[31] Russia correctly realised that the U.S. government was deeply involved – certainly in laying the groundwork for the coup and possibly in fomenting violence.[32] This was followed by a popular reaction in the country’s east that eventually resulted in Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, but only after a referendum that the United States did not recognise. Crimeans, who mostly speak Russian, overwhelmingly voted to join the Russian Federation. When a referendum favouring secession was successfully held in Crimea in March 2014, it was ruled constitutionally invalid by the Ukrainian Supreme Court. Two fundamental principles were in conflict: the right of self-determination and the inviolability of national territory.[33]
It is important to consider that it was only when the United States installed a radically anti-Russian, pro-NATO regime in Ukraine, in February 2014, that Russia finally took back Crimea, concerned that its Black Sea naval base in Crimea (since 1783) would fall into NATO’s hands. What is more, immediately after Russia took control of Crimea, the United States began a massive program of military aid to Ukraine.[34]
In 2017, the U.S. government under the presidency of Donald J. Trump began selling lethal weapons to Ukraine. This was a change from the 2014-2017 policy, where only non-lethal items were sold, such as various types of technical equipment. The Trump administration described the new sales as “defensive.” Arguably, these categories “offensive” and “defensive” only exist in the eye of the beholder.[35] What is considered “defensive” by those having these lethal weapons may very well be regarded as “offensive” by the potential targets of these weapons.
Of course, the United States was not the only Western country to start selling lethal weapons to Ukraine. Despite the fact that Ukraine is not yet a member of NATO, John J. Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, commented:
Other NATO countries have taken action, sending weapons to Ukraine, training its armed forces and allowing it to participate in joint air and naval exercises. In July 2021, Ukraine and the United States co-hosted a major naval exercise in the Black Sea region, involving navies from 32 countries. Operation Sea Breeze nearly provoked Russia to fire on a British naval destroyer that deliberately entered what Russia considers its territorial waters.[36]
For years, Professor Mearsheimer has claimed that the Russian approach towards Ukraine is primarily caused by “Western intervention”. Mearsheimer argues that the United States, in pushing to expand NATO eastward, ‘has increased the likelihood of war between nuclear-armed powers and laid the groundwork’ for Russia’s aggressive position toward Ukraine.[37] With regards to Ukraine, he comments that:
It’s very important to understand that, up until 2014, we did not envision NATO expansion and E.U. expansion as a policy that was aimed at containing Russia. Nobody seriously thought that Russia was a threat before February 22, 2014…. What happened is that this major crisis broke out, and we had to assign blame, and of course we were never going to blame ourselves. We were going to blame the Russians. So we invented this story that Russia was bent on aggression in Eastern Europe. Putin is interested in creating a greater Russia, or maybe even re-creating the Soviet Union.[38]
It is therefore instructive to ascertain in more specific terms what really happened to Ukraine in 2014. With the electoral victory of the pro-Russian candidate, Victor Yanukovych, in the presidential elections of 2010, the Ukrainian parliament voted in that same year to abandon NATO membership aspirations.[39] Yanukovych, “a popular candidate with the working class”, was born into a poor family and worked in heavy industrial mechanics. He later became a successful business executive and eventually entered politics after attending law school.[40] As the elected President of Ukraine, soon he realised that joining that anti-Russian military alliance would be economically detrimental by seriously jeopardising relations with Russia.[41]
President Yanukovych, a democratically elected leader, was arbitrarily removed from office in February 2014 in an US-backed coup. To understand why the removal of Yanukovych was unconstitutional, some facts about the Ukrainian Constitution must be considered. Article 108 of the Ukrainian Constitution lists four circumstances in which an elected president may cease to exercise power before the end of their term: retirement; inability to exercise their powers for reasons of health; removal from office by the procedure of impeachment; and death.
The process of impeachment is laid down in Article 111 of the Ukrainian Constitution. It requires the Ukrainian Parliament to create a special temporary investigation committee to formulate charges against the president, seek evidence to justify the charges, and come to conclusions about the president’s guilt. Prior to a final vote of impeachment, this process also requires the nation’s Constitutional Court to review the case and certify that the procedure has been properly followed, and the Ukrainian Supreme Court to certify that the acts of which the President is accused are worthy of impeachment. Finally, the removal of an elected president from power must be approved by at least three-quarters of the members of Parliament.
On 22 February 2014, this constitutionally required process of impeachment was not followed at all. No investigation committee was formed, and no courts were involved in the removal of the President. Instead, a bill was rushed through Parliament to remove President Yanukovych from his office, although this was not even supported by three-quarters of Members of Parliament, as required by Article 111. On that occasion, Putin complained about the unconstitutional overthrow of a democratically elected president.
When that coup succeeded in expelling the country’s elected president, U.S. President Barack Obama deliberately misled the international community by hiding the imposition of a pro-Western government on ‘Russia’s most neuralgic and politically divided neighbour’.[42] Soon after a new government was established, such government declared itself unable to control the popular reaction to that coup in the country’s east. The American government then conveniently accused Russia of destabilising Ukraine, thus aiming to turn Russia into a “pariah state”.[43] Ever since Ukraine has never been able to have a functional government. Russia almost immediately retaliated by annexing the region of Crimea, in March 2014, but only after a referendum that was not recognised by the United States and its Western allies. Crimeans, who mostly speak Russian, voted overwhelmingly to join the Russian Federation. Writing for the American Conservative, foreign policy expert Dominick Sansone explains:
The move into Crimea came as a response, to secure Russia’s key naval interests in the warm-water port at Sevastopol. The coinciding uprisings in the Donbas were additionally a response to the situation in Kiev … The official position of the Kremlin has subsequently been that these ethnically Russian citizens should not be forced to live under the rule of an illegitimate rebel group that illegally came to power by overthrowing the duly elected government.[44]
The reality is that the eastward expansion of NATO primarily triggered the ongoing war in Ukraine, primarily because of Washington’s attempt to pull this country decisively into its orbit and defence structure by building an explicitly anti-Moscow association.[45] The Russians had already been humiliated by NATO’s decision to expand the Alliance to include former Warsaw Pact countries. The bombing of Serbia by NATO forces in 1999 underlined the geopolitical marginalisation of Russia, unable to protect its traditional ally. Initially, the then Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, offered moral support to Serbian leader Solobodan Milošević but avoided making any public statements that could lead to Russia being drawn into the conflict. The bombings changed that because Moscow was outraged by what was perceived as Western aggression that effectively violated the international law. ‘For the Russians, the Serbs were fellow Slavs who, throughout history, were their allies.’[46]
When considering the 30 years of history above described, one has to ask: How would Washington react if Moscow carried out equivalent military actions near the U.S. territory? For example, how would Washington respond if Moscow established a military alliance with Mexico and then deployed rocket installations 70 miles from the U.S. border? What would the United States do had Russia used these rocket facilities to conduct training exercises to practice destroying military bases inside the United States? Would the American political establishment just happily accept mere verbal assurances from the Russian President that his intentions are benign?[47] As Professor Sachs correctly points out,
The continuing U.S. obsession with NATO enlargement is profoundly irresponsible and hypocritical. The U.S. would object – by means of war, if needed – to being encircled by Russian or military bases in the Western Hemisphere, a point the U.S. has made since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. Yet the U.S. is blind and deaf to the legitimate security concerns of other countries.[48]
Although successive U.S. administrations have been trying to turn Ukraine into another American bulwark, the United States would never tolerate Canada or Mexico asking to join a military alliance with Russia and allowing weapons of mass destruction to be installed within its borders. It is difficult not to agree that this continuing U.S. obsession with NATO enlargement is profoundly irresponsible and hypocritical. If Russia had taken equivalent actions – say, by placing its military forces in Mexico – Washington would have reacted and even possibly started a war, justifying this as a defensive response to the military invasion of a foreign power.
When viewed through these lens, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not a reflection of a malevolent Russian leader’s unbridled expansionism, but primarily a reaction to misguided Western policies and an attempt to re-establish a zone around Russia’s western border free of offensive threats from the U.S. and its European allies.[49] As noted by Mearsheimer,
The United States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, much less on its borders. Image the outrage in Washington if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico in it. Logic aside, Russian leaders have told their Western counterparts on many occasions that they consider NATO expansion into Georgia and Ukraine unacceptable, along with any effort to turn those countries against Russia – a message that the 2008 Russian-Georgian war also made crystal clear.[50]
To repeat, Russia went to war primarily to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. Why does Russia oppose NATO enlargement? Professor Sachs provides the answer:
For the simple reason that Russia does not accept the US. Military on its 2,300 km border with Ukraine in the Black Sea region. Russia does not appreciate the U.S. Placement of Aegis missiles in Poland and Romania after the U.S. unilaterally abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty. Russia does not welcome the fact that the U.S. engaged in no fewer than 70 regime change operations during the Cold War (1947-1989), and countless more since, including in Serbia, Afghanistan, Georgia, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, and Ukraine. Nor does Russia like the fact that many leading U.S. politicians actively advocated the destruction of Russia under the banner of “Decolonizing Russia”. That would be like Russia calling for the removal of Texas, California, Hawaii, the conquered Indian lands, and much else, from the United States.[51]
In this sense, it is perfectly reasonable to assert that Ukraine is the political, geographical, and diplomatic equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse.[52] In 1962, the world faced a similarly dangerous situation, when, during the Cold War, the Soviets installed nuclear missiles in Cuba – a neighbouring country to the United States. Faced with that looming threat, the then American President, John F. Kennedy, ordered the naval blockade of the island, lifted only when the Soviet Union withdrew their missiles from Cuba. Just as the United States did not accept, in 1962, the Soviet threat along its border, in this new kind of ‘Cold War’, the Russians are unwilling to have a U.S. military presence at his country’s doorsteps and demand the reversal of NATO’s expansionist policy.
And now the Russians reasonably sense that NATO has dangerously moved right up to their border, by attempting to turn Ukraine effectively into a de facto member of this U.S. military alliance. According to Seumas Milne, a British journalist and former Labour Party’s Executive Director of Strategy and Communications:
No Russian government could have acquiesced in such a threat from territory that was at the heart of both Russia and the Soviet Union. Putin’s absorption of Crimea and support for the rebellion in eastern Ukraine is clearly defensive, and the red line now drawn: the east of Ukraine, at least, is not going to be swallowed up by NATO or the EU.[53]
As can be seen, the prevailing narrative of “unprovoked” Russian aggression completely fails to consider the role that successive U.S. administrations have played in ultimately provoking this ongoing war in Ukraine. Arguably, this war will only end when the U.S. government acknowledges that NATO enlargement to Ukraine means war with Russia at the expanse of Ukraine’s total destruction.[54]
As a matter of fact, even the Ukrainian government has acknowledged that the quest for NATO enlargement meant imminent war with Russia. Oleksiy Arestovych, former adviser to the Office of President Zelensky, once commented that “with a 99.9 per cent probability, our price for joining NATO is a big war with Russia”.[55] Commenting on the present conflict in Ukraine, Bill Roggio, a senior colleague at the Foundation for Defense of Democracy and editor of its Long War Journal, states that:
Putin appears to want to take Ukraine intact… The systematic nature of the Russian assault is at odds with the speculation that Putin has lost control of his senses. Nobody knows for sure, but Putin’s actions appear to be that of a cold and calculating adversary. Dismissing his decision to invade Ukraine as a form of madness is effectively an excuse to ignore Putin’s likely motivations and future actions.[56]
To conclude, Ukraine’s neutrality could have avoided the war and remains key to peace.[57] Ukraine would need to renounce its NATO aspirations and be turned into a buffer zone between Russia on one side and NATO on the other. Alternatively, the war would come to an end if President Biden announced that the U.S. and its European allies no longer desire to see Ukraine ever joining NATO.[58]
Meanwhile, Ukraine continues to be destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of people being killed, primarily due to the arrogance of Western oligarchs and particularly the U.S. government, thus proving again the veracity of Henry Kissinger’s adage that ‘to be America’s enemy is dangerous, while to be its friend is fatal’.[59] As British author and journalist Peter Hitchens correctly points out: ‘We’ve used Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia. Ukraine is the victim of our militancy. We’ve done the shouting, they get bombed’.[60] I wholeheartedly agree.
Augusto Zimmermann PhD, LLM, LLB, CIArb, DipEd is a former Associate Dean, Research, at Murdoch Law School. During his time at Murdoch, Dr Zimmermann was awarded the University’s Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research in 2012. He is also a former Commissioner with the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia (2012-2017).
Professor Zimmermann is the co-author of ‘Merchants of Death: Global Oligarchs and their War on Humanity’ (USA Press, 2024).
[1] Editorial, ‘We Must Dig Deep to Beat Vladimir Putin, the Hitler of our Age’, The Sun, 24 February 2022, at https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/17763814/vladimir-putin-hitler-of-our-age/
[2] ‘NATO Chief: NATO Expansion Caused Russian Invasion’, Consortium News, 9 September 2023, at https://consortiumnews.com/2023/09/09/nato-chief-nato-expansion-caused-russian-invasion/
[3] ‘Joe Biden is Certain: Russia is Preparing to Invade Ukraine’, Novinite.com, 19 February 2022, at https://www.novinite.com/articles/213815/Joe+Biden+is+Certain%3A+Russia+is+Preparing+to+Invade+Ukraine. See also: Farrah Tomazin, ‘Biden Convinced Putin Will Invade Ukraine, Target Kyiv’, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 February 2022, at https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/russian-backed-rebels-evacuate-east-ukraine-residents-20220219-p59xw3.html
[4] Gabriël Moens and Augusto Zimmermann, ‘The US Administration’s Ukrainian War Mongering’, The Epoch Times, 20 February 2022, at https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-u-s-administrations-ukrainian-war-mongering_4290843.html.
[5] Mark Fulmer, The Proxy War in Ukraine: A Geopolitical Strategy of the Global Elites (Liberty Hill Publishing, 2024) 9.
[6] ‘Jeffrey Sachs blames US ‘irresponsibility’ for Ukraine crisis’, Azerbaycan24, 15 June 2024, at https://www.azerbaycan24.com/en/jeffrey-sachs-blames-us-irresponsibility-for-ukraine-crisis/
[7] Benjamin Abelow, How the West Brought War to Ukraine (Siland Press, 2022) 58.
[8] ‘Jeffrey Sachs blames US ‘irresponsibility’ for Ukraine crisis’, Azerbaycan24, 15 June 2024, at https://www.azerbaycan24.com/en/jeffrey-sachs-blames-us-irresponsibility-for-ukraine-crisis/
[9] Ibid.
[10] Jeffrey Sachs, ‘NATO Expansion and Ukraine’s Destruction’, Consortium News, 21 September 2023, at https://consortiumnews.com/2023/09/21/jeffrey-sachs-nato-expansion-ukraines-destruction/
[11] Jonathan Power, ‘Ukraine Should Have a Policy of ‘Non-Involvement with NATO’, Opined Zbigniew Brzezinski’, IDN – InDepthNews, 26 February 2022, at https://www.indepthnews.net/index.php/opinion/5106-ukraine-should-have-a-policy-of-non-involvement-with-nato-opined-zbigniew-brzezinski
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Philip Short, Putin: His Life and Times (The Bodley Head, 2022) 230.
[15] Peter Rutland, ‘An Unnecessary War: The Geopolitical Roots of the Ukraine Crisis’, Wesleyan University, April 9, 2015, at http://prutland.faculty.wesleyan.edu/files/2015/07/Geopolitics-and-the-Ukraine-crisis.pdf
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid. 231.
[18] Nina Khrushcheva and Jeffrey Tayler, In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones (St. Martin’s Press, 2019) 51.
[19] Nina Khrushcheva and Jeffrey Tayler, In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones (St. Martin’s Press, 2019)
[20] Nina Khrushcheva and Jeffrey Tayler, In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones (St. Martin’s Press, 2019) 51-52.
[21] Ibid.
[22] John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault’, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2014, 8.
[23] Ibid. 7.
[24] Ibid. 2.
[25] Benjamin Abelow, How the West Brought War to Ukraine (Siland Press, 2022)
[26] John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault’, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2014, 3.
[27] ‘Brussels Summit Communiqué’, Issued by Heads of State and Government participating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council in Brussels, 14 June 2021, para. 69. at https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_185000.html
[28] Benjamin Abelow, How the West Brought War to Ukraine (Siland Press, 2022) 52.
[29] ‘John McCain Tells Ukraine Protesters: ‘We are here to support your just cause’’, The Guardian, December 16, 2013, at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/15/john-mccain-ukraine-protests-support-just-cause
[30] Ibid.
[31] Benjamin Abelow, How the West Brought War to Ukraine (Siland Press, 2022) 15.
[32] Ibid. 16.
[33] Philip Short, Putin: His Life and Times (The Bodley Head, 2022) 230.
[34] Benjamin Abelow, How the West Brought War to Ukraine (Siland Press, 2022) 19.
[35] Ibid. 21.
[36] John Mearsheimer, “Why the West is Principally Responsible for the Ukrainian Crisis’, The Economist, 19 March 2022, at https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/03/11/john-mearsheimer-on-why-the-west-is-principally-responsible-for-the-ukrainian-crisis
[37] Isaac Chotiner, ‘Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine’, The New Yorker, March 1, 2022, at https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-john-mearsheimer-blames-the-us-for-the-crisis-in-ukraine
[38] Isaac Chotiner, ‘Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine’, The New Yorker, March 1, 2022, at https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-john-mearsheimer-blames-the-us-for-the-crisis-in-ukraine
[39] Peter Rutland, ‘An Unnecessary War: The Geopolitical Roots of the Ukraine Crisis’, Wesleyan University, April 9, 2015, at http://prutland.faculty.wesleyan.edu/files/2015/07/Geopolitics-and-the-Ukraine-crisis.pdf
[40] Mark Fulmer, The Proxy War in Ukraine: A Geopolitical Strategy of the Global Elites (Liberty Hill Publishing, 2024) 32.
[41] Mark Fulmer, The Proxy War in Ukraine: A Geopolitical Strategy of the Global Elites (Liberty Hill Publishing, 2024) 33.
[42] Seumas Milne, ‘It’s not Russia that’s pushed Ukraine to the brink of war’, The Guardian, May 1, 2022, at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/30/russia-ukraine-war-kiev-conflict
[43] Seumas Milne, ‘It’s not Russia that’s pushed Ukraine to the brink of war’, The Guardian, May 1, 2022, at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/30/russia-ukraine-war-kiev-conflict
[44] Dominick Sansone, ‘How We Got Here: Ukraine’, The American Conservative, March 5, 2022, at https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-we-got-here-ukraine/.
[45] Seumas Milne, ‘It’s not Russia that’s pushed Ukraine to the brink of war’, The Guardian, May 1, 2022, at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/30/russia-ukraine-war-kiev-conflict
[46] Philip Short, Putin: His Life and Times (The Bodley Head, 2022) 272.
[47] Benjamin Abelow, How the West Brought War to Ukraine (Siland Press, 2022) 25.
[48] Jeffrey Sachs, ‘NATO Expansion and Ukraine’s Destruction’, Consortium News, 21 September 2023, at https://consortiumnews.com/2023/09/21/jeffrey-sachs-nato-expansion-ukraines-destruction/
[49] Benjamin Abelow, How the West Brought War to Ukraine (Siland Press, 2022) 2.
[50] John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault’, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2014, 5-6.
[51] Jeffrey Sachs, ‘NATO Expansion and Ukraine’s Destruction’, Consortium News, 21 September 2023, at https://consortiumnews.com/2023/09/21/jeffrey-sachs-nato-expansion-ukraines-destruction/
[52] Scott Lively, ‘Ukraine: Part of Biden’s Great Collapse before ‘Great Reset’’, WND News Center, February 24, 2022, at https://www.wndnewscenter.org/ukraine-part-of-bidens-great-collapse-before-great-reset/
[53] Seumas Milne, ‘It’s not Russia that’s pushed Ukraine to the brink of war’, The Guardian, May 1, 2022, at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/30/russia-ukraine-war-kiev-conflict
[54] Ibid.
[55] Jeffrey Sachs, ‘NATO Expansion and Ukraine’s Destruction’, Consortium News, 21 September 2023, at https://consortiumnews.com/2023/09/21/jeffrey-sachs-nato-expansion-ukraines-destruction/
[56] Bill Roggio, ‘Putin is not crazy and the Russian invasion is not failing. The West’s delusions about this war – and its failure to understand the enemy will prevent it from saving Ukraine’, Foundation for Defense of Democracies – FDD, March 2, 2022, at https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2022/03/02/putin-not-crazy-russian-invasion-not-failing/
[57] Ibid.
[58] Jonathan Power, ‘Ukraine Should Have a Policy of ‘Non-Involvement with NATO’, Opined Zbigniew Brzezinski’, IDN – InDepthNews, 26 February 2022, at https://www.indepthnews.net/index.php/opinion/5106-ukraine-should-have-a-policy-of-non-involvement-with-nato-opined-zbigniew-brzezinski
[59] Jeffrey Sachs, ‘NATO Expansion and Ukraine’s Destruction’, Consortium News, 21 September 2023, at https://consortiumnews.com/2023/09/21/jeffrey-sachs-nato-expansion-ukraines-destruction/
[60] ‘Peter Hitchens: “We’ve used Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia’, YouTube, February 28, 2022, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvmddazUW3I
