This view – that somehow Putin came out of nowhere to invade Ukraine – completely disregards Russia’s widespread opposition to NATO’s expansion over many years. After former members of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union joined the military alliance, Russia repeatedly warned that Ukraine’s ascension to NATO would be the last straw.
In 2008, after then-US president George W Bush named Ukraine and Georgia as the likely next candidates to join NATO, Russia immediately said that such a move would cause a “deep crisis” and was a “huge strategic mistake”.
By advertising Ukraine’s accession to NATO at some unknown date well into the future and repeatedly encouraging Kyiv to come into their fold, the US and Europe effectively created a window for Putin to invade. Do it now, before it’s too late, is how Putin interpreted the message.
There is no more dangerous position to be in the world than a prospective NATO member; countries should either be in or out, and they shouldn’t be courted for more than a decade. From this perspective, NATO’s expansion wasn’t too fast, it was too slow.
The triumphalism creeping in among Western commentators – that somehow a bloody, drawn-out stalemate is a win for Ukraine – is not a view shared among ordinary Ukrainians.
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Even those who have taken up arms told me that they wished diplomacy had won the day before Russia invaded. They also regret that their allies in the West did not find a way for them to join NATO sooner, rather than repeatedly floating it without any real plan.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently recognised his country had no realistic immediate path to NATO membership – a concession he would have never made before the invasion.
Zelensky will now have to make more significant concessions to get Russian forces out, which could include relinquishing large parts of the Donbas region and making a long-term guarantee not to join NATO.
If the US and its allies don’t learn from these mistakes, they are doomed to repeat them.
You only need to listen to Milorad Dodik, the leader of the Serbian entity Republika Srpska within Bosnia, to see that Putin’s playbook in Ukraine and Georgia is now being repeated in the former Yugoslavia.
The site of a rocket explosion where a large shopping centre complex used to be in Kyiv, Ukraine. Credit:Getty Images
How is the West going to respond to Bosnia’s heightened calls to join NATO?
With Ukraine as any guide, it will lead it up the garden path.
Ukraine has shown us a lot about how to fight a 21st-century war, with a sense of duty, nationhood and loyalty that many in the West lost decades ago.
If this fight has taught us anything, it’s that Ukraine shouldn’t become more like the West.
The West should become more like Ukraine.
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