Ukraine, NATO, and Russia

I have seen a resurgence of a false account of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, so I have assembled a debunking here. I expect I may add resources over time, if it keeps coming up.

The false thesis goes something like this:

It is wrong for the West (the US & Western Europe) to fault Russia for invading Ukraine. It was a predictable response to Western foolishness & aggessiveness toward Russia.

Given Napoleon in the 19^th century and Hitler in the 20^th, Russians have good reasons to worry about security threats from the West. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russians have said clearly that they would read expansion of NATO toward Russia as an existential threat, so the West promised back in the 1990s not to rouse that concern.

The West betrayed that promise with aggressive expansion of NATO, toward the end of Western troops right on Russia’s border with Ukraine.

Much as the Soviets created a buffer of client states in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, Russia has seized part of eastern Ukraine as a buffer against the West now. Putin is eager to embrace peace with Ukraine, if they simply allow that ethnically-Russian territory to have an independent, Russia-friendly government, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelens’kyi refuses because he is an instrument of the West’s dangerous betrayal of Russia.

I dug down the rabbit hole of this argument a couple of years ago. It is deceitful Russian propaganda.

False history

The biggest hole in this thesis is how Ukraine has not joined NATO. That should end the argument right there.

But but but, they say, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was triggered by the security threat presented by a pattern of aggressive NATO expansion pointing to Ukraine eventually joining.

This does not hold water.

Russia invaded Ukraine in the 2020s because the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania which share a border with Russia joined NATO … in ’04? Between then and Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the Russians sent weapons and troops into Ukraine starting in 2014 while the only addition to NATO was North Macedonia ’20, which does not share a border with Russia. The timeline makes no sense.

But but but, they say, that still did break the promise the West made to the Russians back in the 1990s.

No. The West made no such promise.

But but but, they say, there has been talk of Ukraine joining NATO!

True. The Ukranian parliament voted to pursue NATO membership at the end of 2014, reversing their prior disinterest.

Aha oho oho, they say, Ukraine changed their tune because in 2014 the West created the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in order to get a friendly government which would support NATO expansion.

That reading compounds several absurdities.

It ignores the Ukrainian motivation that earlier in 2014, Russia sent weapons and troops into eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea on Ukraine’s southern border.

Yes, Maidan did have Western support, but it was an organic popular movement which did not need the help. Ukrainians have obvious reasons to favor building ties to the (rich & democratic) West over ties to Russia, which is impoverished, ruled by a dictator who denies Ukrainian national legitimacy, and genocided millions of Ukrainians in the 20^th century.

Again, how is the West “pushing” for NATO expansion if a decade after Ukraine made these overtures, it still is not a member? For the last decade, NATO has responded to Ukraine, “yeah, okay, we can offer some support and someday maybe we will let you join”, while some NATO member states remain hesitant over the prospect, since it would commit them to potential war with Russia.

And Zelens’kyi? He refuses “peace” because the only “peace” on offer from Russia is seizure of Ukranian territory with zero security guarantees against further Russian aggression. That is not diplomacy, that is a demand of surrender.

Moral absurdity

The claim that the West provoked Russia is not just absurd, it is morally repulsive. NATO is not an aggressive alliance, it is a mutual-defense agreement: an attack on one is an attack on all. Sying that Russia had to invade Ukraine to prevent it from joining an alliance which would defend it from invasion is like saying:

“That domestic violence shelter is responsible for provoking Ukraine’s ex-husband to break into her house and beat her again, like he did years ago. They should not have endangered Ukraine by accepting a call to their hotline after he showed up pounding on her door.”

References

• Russian Disinformation on NATO Expansion and the War in Ukraine (2023) — from a US Army analyst
• Exposing the myth of Western betrayal of Russia over NATO’s eastern enlargement (2022) — a succinct analysis from an expert
• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was never about NATO expansion (2025) — a short critique of the thesis, with numerous links to supporting resources
• Putin debunks his own propaganda by disarming Russia’s NATO borders (2023) — what it says on the tin
• Russia’s belief in Nato ‘betrayal’ – and why it matters today (2022) — contextualizing the thesis in the historical half-truths it relies upon
• Ex-Nato head says Putin wanted to join alliance early on in his rule (2021) — more on Putin’s frame of mind: “‘Well, we don’t invite people to join Nato, they apply to join Nato.’ And [Putin] said: ‘Well, we’re not standing in line with a lot of countries that don’t matter.’”
• Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine (2022) — an interview with the most promiment American proponent of the Russian thesis, in which he cannot answer straightforward questions about his argument
• The American Pundits Who Can’t Resist “Westsplaining” Ukraine (2022) — digging into Mearsheimer and other commentators
• Antisemitism in the Oval Office — historian Timothy Snyder contextualizng at instructive length how the White House meeting emerges from antisemitic Russian propaganda about Zelens’kyi

A long later comment

In a discussion, someone told me that Ukraine’s Maidan revolution in 2014 was “astroturfed” by the US to produce a “proxy war” to weaken the Russians. They offered Chinese propaganda claiming that all color revolutions are supported by the US, and said that it was naïve to ignore US covert action.

Sure, covert action is a thing

I am an American lefty. I can name countless examples of covert skulduggery by the US intervening in other countries’ politics. The known history is extensive.

It is indeed hard to gauge how effective those efforts have been because the whole idea is that if they work well, one does not see the US’ fingerprints on the results. The history we do have suggests that the US is clumsy more often than not, but even just a moderately attentive amateur like me has seen enough to know that American technique has developed and refined a great deal in the last couple of decades under the logic of “Fourth Generation Warfare” integrating information control (including but not limited to propaganda) and political influence in military thinking. It is plausible that US covert action today is not so clumsy one might imagine given the history we know.

Given all that, despite not seeing any evidence demonstrating US intervention in support of Maidan, I consider it safe to assume that there must have been some covert involvement by the US. But that is far short of the much stronger conclusion they drew.

There is no reason to think Maidan was “astroturfed”

It was an organic Ukrainian popular movement. There were institutional motives: Yanukovych’s corruption and authoritarianism provoked opposition and an appetite to return to the 2004 constitution. There were policy motives: Ukraine has more to gain looking west for alliances rather than east.

Covert US support for Maidan may well have helped the revolution succed, but there is no reason to believe it was the primary force. There were people in the street. Protestors seized government buildings. The police folded under the pressure. Ongoing popular support over the last decade for the political order which resulted demonstrates the organic strength of the political movement.

Believing that Ukrainians could not have had their own revolution reminds me of American leaders during the Cold War who made the catastrophically stupid error of assuming that anticolonial movements were nothing other than a catspaw created by Soviet & PRC intervention. Of course Soviet & PRC support did play an important role in those movements — one cannot understand Cold War anticolonial movements without incorporating that — but colonized people have obvious reasons to fight colonialism, and the refusal to recognize that produced catastrophic failures of American policy. The entire Vietnam War, for instance.

To the degree that one can understand the “color revolutions” since the Arab Spring as a coherent constellation, and count the Maidan revolution among them, sure one can see them benefitting from American methods, tech, intel, and even material resources … but that does not mean that they have been designed and directed by the US. Local movements have their own motivations. Local movements can figure things out. The US is not the only actor on stage.

There is no reason to think that Maidan in 2014 compelled Putin to invade Ukraine in 2022

Putin has a pattern of military interventions in eastern Europe, and a particular obsession with Ukraine as a lost part of the empire with no legitimacy as its own sovereign state. He did not need the Maidan revolution to choose to try to annex (at least part of) Ukraine. He did not need the US to manipulate him into it.

There is no reason to think that the US wants the Russia-Ukraine war as a way to weaken Russia. Everyone has been surprised by the course of the war since 2022; the US could not have planned it. We have seen the US and broader west support Ukraine at arm’s length, trying to thread the needle of preventing Russian expansionism without risking further escalation. I cannot believe that planners in the US were able to titrate the exact right amount of expressed commitment to protecting Ukraine that would provoke rather than deter Putin.

There is no reason to accept a stack of absurdities

Imagining that the US pulled a Thanatos gambit which lured the Russians into a quagmire by controlling the course of politics in Ukraine requires believing six impossible things before breakfast. US intervention in Ukraine was vigorous and effective and had complete control of the results and the US sought Just The Right Amount Of Proxy War and they hit that target by puppeteering Ukraine? Preposterous.

If the US had such immense powers of covert political manipulation, why wouldn’t we just engineer a color revolution in Russia to overthrow Putin?