Part I: The Promise That Was Made — and Broken

The Baker Assurance, 1990

On February 9, 1990, US Secretary of State James Baker met Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow. The subject was German reunification. There had never been a formal treaty to end World War II. The Soviet Union — which had lost 27 million people to Hitler's armies — had consistently demanded a demilitarised, neutral Germany as its primary post-war security condition. The United States refused that position and instead chose to rearm Germany within NATO, framing it as a defence against communism rather than a pragmatic guarantee of Soviet security.

In 1990, the price of Soviet acquiescence to German reunification within NATO was explicit: in exchange, Baker told Gorbachev there would be "no extension of NATO's jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east."

This assurance was not a vague diplomatic pleasantry. It was repeated by Baker, by West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, by Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and by British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd — all in the weeks surrounding German reunification. The National Security Archive at George Washington University published the relevant declassified documents in December 2017. The primary Baker-Gorbachev memorandum of conversation, confirming the "not one inch" language verbatim, is publicly accessible.

[NSA Briefing Book #613, December 12, 2017: nsarchive.gwu.edu]

[Baker-Gorbachev memorandum of conversation, February 9, 1990: nsarchive.gwu.edu]

Mikhail Gorbachev — a man who ended the Cold War, dissolved the Warsaw Pact unilaterally, and trusted that his Western counterparts would honour their commitments — agreed. He is remembered in Russia primarily for the collapse of the Soviet Union and for inflation. He deserves to be remembered as the statesman who made the peaceful end of the Cold War possible, and who was subsequently cheated by every party he trusted. The Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991. Within three years, the assurances were being actively dismantled.

Clinton Signs Off: 1994

In January 1994, President Bill Clinton formally announced NATO enlargement to the east. The decision — formalised through the Partnership for Peace framework and then accelerated through the 1995 Study on NATO Enlargement — explicitly identified former Warsaw Pact states, and ultimately Ukraine and Georgia, as candidates for membership.

George Kennan, writing in the New York Times in February 1997, described this as the "most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era." He predicted it would "inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion," restore the atmosphere of the cold war, and "impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking." He was predicting, with precision, exactly what came to pass — twenty-five years before it did.

Kennan was the intellectual architect of the entire post-war Western strategic order. When he said this was a catastrophic mistake, he was speaking from inside the house. Official Washington ignored him.

[George Kennan, "A Fateful Error," New York Times, February 5, 1997: midcoastseniorcollege.org]

The 1999 Expansion and Belgrade: Russia's First Warning

NATO's first formal eastward expansion came in March 1999: Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. That same month — March 24, 1999 — NATO began a 78-day bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Belgrade, a European capital, was bombed continuously. Serbian civilian infrastructure was destroyed. Kosovo was forcibly separated from Serbia in an operation with no UN Security Council authorisation.

The message delivered to Moscow was precise: NATO was not a defensive alliance constrained by international law. It was an instrument of Western strategic will, deployable against any state that defied the emerging unipolar order. Russia had proposed diplomatic alternatives. Russia was ignored.

[Putin Munich Security Conference speech, February 10, 2007: en.kremlin.ru]

2002: The ABM Treaty and the Nuclear Destabilisation

In December 2002, the United States unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty — the foundational arms control agreement that had maintained nuclear deterrence stability since 1972. The withdrawal was not a response to any Russian provocation. It was a unilateral strategic choice.

What followed was the deployment of Aegis missile systems in Poland and then in Romania — systems that Russia identified as capable of being reconfigured to fire offensive Tomahawk cruise missiles, thereby potentially enabling a decapitation strike on Russian command infrastructure within minutes of launch. For Moscow, this was not a theoretical concern. It was a direct alteration of the strategic nuclear balance, combined with the simultaneous advance of NATO's conventional military infrastructure toward Russia's border.

The combination of conventional expansion and nuclear framework destabilisation, running simultaneously through the 2000s, is what gives the Russian security argument its structural coherence. This was not one provocation. It was a sustained, layered degradation of every security framework that had governed the post-Cold War relationship.

2004: NATO Arrives at Russia's Border

The second major expansion came in March 2004. Seven countries joined simultaneously: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. The three Baltic states brought NATO's military infrastructure to within 150 kilometres of St. Petersburg, Russia's second city.

John Mearsheimer, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, had been warning since the early 1990s that this trajectory would end in catastrophe. His 2014 Foreign Affairs piece made the structural argument precisely: no major power tolerates military alliance infrastructure on its border, and the United States would respond identically — within minutes — to any comparable Russian expansion toward its own perimeter. This prediction was made twenty years before the invasion. It was ignored because it was inconvenient.

[Mearsheimer, "Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West's Fault," Foreign Affairs, September/October 2014: foreignaffairs.com]

Part II: Russia, Ukraine, and the History That Makes This Worse

The Counter-Argument: "Putin Wants the Soviet Union Back"

Before going further, the most common objection must be addressed directly — because it is not entirely without basis, and because its partial truth is being used to foreclose the more important structural argument.

The objection: Vladimir Putin published a 5,000-word essay in July 2021, "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians," arguing that Russians and Ukrainians are fundamentally one people — sharing a civilisational origin, a spiritual heritage, and a common history artificially severed by Western manipulation. He questioned the legitimacy of Ukraine's post-Soviet borders. The Carnegie Endowment described it as "a historical, political, and security predicate for invading Ukraine." Former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves compared it to Hitler's 1938 rhetoric on the Sudetenland.

[Putin, "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians," Kremlin, July 12 2021: en.kremlin.ru]

State the concession plainly: Putin has imperial instincts. The essay is real. The historical claims in it are selectively assembled in service of a political argument. None of this is in dispute.

Now state what this concession does not establish — and why the objection, taken seriously, deepens the indictment of Western strategy rather than weakening it.

The History Is Real — And That Is Precisely the Problem

The shared civilisational history between Russia and Ukraine is not a Putin invention. Kyiv — the capital of modern Ukraine — was the founding city of Kievan Rus, the medieval state from which both Russian and Ukrainian national identities descend. Orthodox Christianity, the defining spiritual framework of Russian civilisation, was adopted in Kyiv in 988 AD. The first textbook of Russian history was written in Kyiv in the 1670s. The Moscow Patriarchate traces its ecclesiastical lineage directly to Kyiv.

This is not contested by serious historians. It is the starting point of the dispute — because both Russian and Ukrainian national identity claim this inheritance, and the question of which people it belongs to is itself a live political battleground.

The subsequent centuries — Ottoman pressure from the south, Polish-Lithuanian dominance of western Ukraine from the 15th century, the incorporation of left-bank Ukraine into the Russian Empire in 1654, the absorption of right-bank Ukraine through the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century, the Soviet construction of a Ukrainian SSR with borders incorporating predominantly Russian-speaking eastern territories — produced a country whose eastern and western halves had been shaped by genuinely different historical experiences.

By 1991, Ukraine contained: a predominantly Ukrainian-speaking, historically Catholic west shaped by Habsburg and Polish influence; a predominantly Russian-speaking, historically Orthodox east shaped by Russian imperial integration; Crimea — transferred from Russia to Ukraine by Soviet administrative decision in 1954, with a population that was 65% ethnically Russian; and a capital sitting roughly at the cultural fault line between these two orientations.

This complexity is genuine. And it is the single most important fact for understanding what follows — because a state with this precise historical structure is the last place on Earth a rational actor should run a NATO expansion operation through.

Unless, of course, that complexity was the point.

Brzezinski Tells You Exactly Why Ukraine Was Chosen

In 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski — National Security Advisor to President Carter, architect of America's Cold War strategy in Central Asia, the most influential US geostrategist of the 20th century — published The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. This was not a classified document. It was a mainstream academic text, reviewed in Foreign Affairs, praised by the German Foreign Minister in its foreword. It laid out explicitly what American grand strategy in Eurasia should look like for the coming generation.

On Ukraine, Brzezinski was precise:

"Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire."

And further:

"However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia."

And on the overall objective:

"It is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus also of challenging America."

[Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, 1997 — full text hosted on CIA.gov: cia.gov]

Read that again with the preceding section in mind. Brzezinski is not describing Ukraine's NATO membership as an incidental democratic outcome. He is identifying Ukraine as the single most important geopolitical lever for preventing Russia from reconstituting as a Eurasian great power. He is saying, in plain language, that the orientation of Ukraine is the mechanism by which American primacy in Eurasia is either preserved or lost.

This book was published in 1997. The NED was already operating in Ukraine. The Partnership for Peace was already running. Brzezinski was not reacting to events. He was describing a strategic objective already being pursued — and providing its intellectual justification in advance.

The "Putin wants Ukraine back" argument collapses on contact with The Grand Chessboard. Of course Ukraine has historical and strategic significance to Russia. That is precisely why it was chosen as the primary expansion front. American strategists understood exactly what they were doing. They selected the territory most entangled with Russian identity, most culturally divided, most sensitive to Moscow's security calculations — and ran their most aggressive expansion operation directly through it. The historical complexity was not an obstacle. It was the instrument.

The Baltic States Pattern: Empire or Containment?

The empirical test of whether Putin's motivation is imperial reconstitution or security containment is the observable pattern of where he actually moved — and where he did not.

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania joined NATO in March 2004. All three are former Soviet republics. All three have significant Russian-speaking minority populations. All three border Russian territory directly. If Putin's motivation were Soviet reconstitution, these are obvious first targets. He did not move against them. In twenty-one years since their accession, no military action.

Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia — all former Warsaw Pact states, now NATO members. No military action.

Putin moved militarily in three specific cases: Georgia in 2008, when NATO formally signalled that Georgia would eventually receive membership at the Bucharest summit; Crimea in 2014, following the Western-backed removal of the neutrality-oriented Yanukovych government; Ukraine in 2022, following the December 2021 rejection of his security treaty proposals and the continued acceleration of Ukrainian NATO integration.

The pattern is unambiguous. Putin moved in precise correlation with the most acute NATO expansion pressures — not in correlation with the existence of former Soviet territory or Russian-speaking populations as such.

An empire reconstructor expands wherever opportunity allows. A security-maximiser responds to specific provocation at specific pressure points. The empirical record is consistent with the second model and inconsistent with the first.

This does not make Putin's conduct legitimate or proportionate. It makes the standard Western framing — "unprovoked aggression by a man who wants the Soviet Union back" — analytically false. And analytical falseness in the framing of a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people is not an academic problem. It is the mechanism by which the architects of the conditions that produced the war escape accountability for what they built.

The Deeper Implication: Weaponising History Against Its Inhabitants

The genuine historical complexity of Ukraine — the Kievan Rus inheritance, the east-west cultural fault line, the Russian-speaking east, the Habsburg-influenced west — did not by itself create the conditions for this war. That complexity existed for centuries without producing a conflict of this scale. What converted it into a collision was the deliberate decision to run a strategic expansion operation through the most historically contested, most culturally divided, most geopolitically sensitive state in the entire post-Soviet space.

Brzezinski told you why: because that complexity is what makes Ukraine the decisive lever. A homogeneous, stable Ukraine with a settled national identity would be strategically less valuable. A divided, contested, historically entangled Ukraine — pulled simultaneously by its Russian-speaking east and its Western-oriented west, sitting precisely on the fault line between NATO's expansion ambitions and Russia's security red lines — is the maximum pressure point. Its very instability is its strategic utility.

The people who designed this strategy understood Ukrainian history better than most Ukrainians were permitted to discuss it publicly. They chose this territory not despite its complexity but because of it.

The flag that well-meaning Westerners display on their social media profiles is the symbol of a country whose historical complexity was identified thirty years ago as the optimal instrument for degrading Russian great power capacity — by the man whose ideas became the blueprint for American Eurasian strategy. The people waving the flag do not know this. The people who designed the strategy did.

That is the full weight of what instrumentalisation means.

Part III: The Formation of Ukraine — How a Country Gets Built Into a War

The First Colour Revolution: 2004

The 2004 Ukrainian presidential election produced a contested result. What followed — the "Orange Revolution" — brought Viktor Yushchenko to power. Western involvement in supporting his campaign has been extensively documented: the National Endowment for Democracy, a US government-funded body whose explicit purpose is political influence promotion abroad, had been operating in Ukraine since the early 1990s, channelling tens of millions of dollars to pro-Western civil society groups, media outlets, and political organisations.

The Guardian's Ian Traynor documented the operation in detail on November 26, 2004 — including the network of US-funded NGOs, the role of Serbian trainers from Otpor (themselves trained and funded by the US), and the overall architecture of what he called "an American creation."

[Ian Traynor, "US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev," The Guardian, November 26, 2004: theguardian.com]

The key point is not whether Yushchenko was undemocratic or whether the electoral fraud wasn't real. The key point is this: a US-backed candidate winning a contested election in a neighbouring state of Russia, on an explicitly NATO-integration platform, engineered through a US-funded operation, is not organic democracy. It is strategic formation dressed as democracy promotion.

It is also worth naming what this represents in terms of imperial logic. The United States, as Jeffrey Sachs has observed, does not accept neutrality as a viable political position. Neutrality — the very outcome Ukrainian voters had repeatedly demonstrated they preferred — is treated by Washington as a defection from the Western order. "You're either with us or you're against us" is not rhetoric. It is operational policy. A neutral Ukraine was always the one outcome the formation process was designed to prevent.

Yanukovych Wins on Neutrality: 2010

In 2010, Viktor Yanukovych ran again. This time the election was not contested. International observers including the OSCE declared it free and fair. Yanukovych won on a platform of Ukrainian neutrality — neither NATO membership nor formal alignment with Russia. This reflected the genuine preferences of much of Ukraine's population, particularly in the east and south.

This data point is almost entirely absent from Western coverage of the conflict. In a free and fair election, the Ukrainian people chose neutrality. They did not choose NATO.

[OSCE/ODIHR Election Observation Mission, Final Report, Ukrainian Presidential Election 2010: osce.org]

Russia's core demand — stated from 2007 onwards, formalised in Putin's December 2021 draft security treaty — was never Ukrainian subjugation. It was Ukrainian neutrality. Which is precisely what Ukrainian democracy had just produced. The distance between what Russia wanted and what Ukrainians had voted for was, at that moment, essentially zero. Western policy spent the next four years eliminating that alignment.

The 2014 Coup: Manufacturing the Break Point

On February 22, 2014, Viktor Yanukovych was removed from power following weeks of violent protest on Kyiv's Maidan. The catalyst was Yanukovych's suspension of an EU Association Agreement — taken after Russia offered Ukraine a $15 billion loan package as an alternative. The protests were real. Popular discontent with a corrupt government was genuine. What followed was not.

The Nuland-Pyatt Call — February 4, 2014

Three weeks before Yanukovych's removal, a phone call between Victoria Nuland — US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs — and Geoffrey Pyatt, US Ambassador to Ukraine, was intercepted and published. Its authenticity was confirmed by State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki.

In the call, Nuland and Pyatt discussed which Ukrainian political figures should fill positions in the post-Yanukovych government. Nuland expressed explicit preference for Arseniy Yatsenyuk as Prime Minister. She dismissed EU diplomatic involvement with the phrase "Fuck the EU." Pyatt discussed how to "midwife" the transition.

Yatsenyuk became Prime Minister twenty-one days later.

This is a senior US official, on record, selecting a foreign government before the sitting government had fallen. The Washington Post, NPR, France 24, and the Atlantic Council all confirmed the call's authenticity.

[Full transcript with BBC commentary: globalresearch.ca]

[Washington Post confirmation: washingtonpost.com]

The Donbas: The War That Precedes the War

Following the 2014 government change, Ukraine's new administration moved against the Russian-speaking population of eastern Ukraine. From 2014 to 2022 — eight years — the Ukrainian military and associated paramilitary formations, including the Azov battalion (documented by Amnesty International for unlawful killings, later incorporated into the National Guard), conducted operations resulting in over 14,000 deaths, the displacement of over 1.5 million people, and sustained artillery bombardment of civilian areas.

This eight-year conflict is largely absent from Western media framing of the Ukraine war, which dates the conflict to February 24, 2022. The omission is structural: if the Donbas exists in the account, the narrative of unprovoked Russian aggression against a peaceful country becomes unsustainable.

[OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine — reports 2014-2022: osce.org]

[Amnesty International, "Unlawful and Lethal," 2014-2015: amnesty.org]

Minsk II: The Agreement Designed Not to Be Kept

In February 2015, Germany, France, Ukraine, and Russia signed the Minsk II agreement. It called for a ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons, and constitutional reform granting autonomy to the Donetsk and Lugansk regions. The UN Security Council endorsed it unanimously via Resolution 2202, making it binding under international law. Ukraine signed it. Its parliament ratified it. It was never implemented.

In December 2022, Angela Merkel told Die Zeit with striking candour: "The 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give Ukraine time. It also used this time to become stronger, as you can see today." Former French President François Hollande made near-identical remarks the same month. Ukrainian President Poroshenko had said the same to domestic audiences in 2015.

Two principal Western guarantors of an internationally binding UN Security Council-endorsed peace agreement have publicly confirmed on the record that the agreement was not made in good faith. It was strategic delay. Russia signed a peace agreement with parties who had already decided they would not honour it.

[Merkel Die Zeit interview, December 7, 2022 — TASS report: tass.com]

[UN Security Council Resolution 2202 (2015): documents.un.org]

Part IV: The Formation Is Complete — Then Used as Justification

What Thirty Years of Cultivation Produces

By 2022, Ukraine's institutional landscape had been systematically shaped across three decades: its political class cultivated through Western-funded programmes and leadership academies; its military retrained and re-equipped to NATO standards through bilateral US, UK, and Canadian programmes since 2015; its media environment reshaped through USAID and NED-linked bodies; its educational institutions subject to systematic Westernisation.

The resulting Ukrainian public preference for NATO integration was real. It was also, in significant part, the output of a thirty-year formation process — institutional, cultural, financial, and political — funded and directed by Western governments and foundations.

This is not a denial of Ukrainian agency. It is the observation that agency and conditioning are not mutually exclusive. The preferences were genuine. The process that produced them was engineered. And once the preferences existed, they were used as justification for the formation itself — a closed recursive loop. The child didn't choose to become what it became in a vacuum. It was built into it. Then what it became was deployed as cover for what built it.

December 2021: The Last Exit

On December 17, 2021, Russia submitted a formal draft security treaty to the United States and NATO. The core demand: no further NATO enlargement, and no deployment of offensive weapons systems in countries bordering Russia.

The US response, delivered by Blinken to Lavrov in January 2022: the United States reserved the right to place military systems wherever it chose. Non-negotiable.

[Russia's December 2021 draft security treaty: mid.ru]

On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded.

Istanbul: The Peace That Wasn't Allowed to Happen

Five days after the invasion, Zelensky's government signalled willingness to negotiate on neutrality. By March 2022, talks in Istanbul had produced a tentative framework — Ukrainian neutrality, security guarantees from third parties, a ceasefire — described by both delegations as near-agreement.

In April 2022, Boris Johnson flew unannounced to Kyiv. Davyd Arakhamia — head of the Ukrainian negotiating delegation — stated in a November 2023 television interview that Johnson had conveyed: the collective West would not support an agreement, and Ukraine should "not sign anything with them at all — let's just fight."

Three days after Johnson's departure, Putin publicly stated the talks had "turned into a dead end."

[Arakhamia interview — Daily Sabah report: dailysabah.com]

[Academic analysis of Istanbul talks — H-Diplo/RJISSF: issforum.org]

The war that has since killed an estimated 600,000–1,000,000 people — the majority Ukrainian — continued because the parties with the most leverage to support a settlement decided that fighting on served their strategic interests better than peace.

Part V: The Capital Architecture of Continuation

The question of who caused the Ukraine war is a question about the past. The question of who profits from its continuation is a question about the present. The answer to the second is structurally independent of the answer to the first.

Defense sector: Lockheed Martin's share price rose 37% in the twelve months following the invasion. Raytheon's order book expanded by billions. BAE Systems, Rheinmetall, and General Dynamics recorded historic order growth. BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street — the Big Three institutional investors — hold dominant stakes across all of them.

Energy sector: European dependence on Russian gas created immediate demand for US LNG exports. The destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022 — sabotaged in an operation that Seymour Hersh attributed in exhaustive detail to a US-directed covert programme — permanently redirected European energy demand toward US suppliers. ExxonMobil and Chevron recorded their highest profits in company history in 2022 and 2023.

[Seymour Hersh, "How America Destroyed the Nord Stream Pipeline," Substack, February 8, 2023: seymourhersh.substack.com]

Reconstruction finance: BlackRock was formally contracted by the Ukrainian government in July 2022 to advise on the reconstruction investment framework — positioning the same institutional investor that profits from the weapons that destroy Ukraine's infrastructure to manage the financial architecture of rebuilding it.

[BlackRock Ukraine advisory announcement, July 2022: blackrock.com]

The weapons that destroy, the energy that profits from disruption, and the capital that manages reconstruction: held by the same institutional shareholder networks. This is not conspiracy. It is structural incentive. The war does not require anyone to have planned it for it to produce these returns. It requires only that the people with the most leverage to end it have the most to gain from its extension.

Part VI: The Global South Axis — What Ukraine Actually Reveals

What Russia Actually Represents

Russia is not a virtuous actor. Its conduct of the war — the targeting of civilian infrastructure, the documented deportation of Ukrainian children for which the ICC issued an arrest warrant against Putin in March 2023, the use of prohibited munitions — is criminal under any standard of international humanitarian law.

[ICC arrest warrant for Putin, ICC-01/22, March 17 2023: icc-cpi.int]

State that clearly. Then state this clearly: none of it changes the structural argument. Russia is not the first state to respond to strategic encirclement with disproportionate force. The United States responded to Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962 with a naval blockade that brought the world to the edge of nuclear war. The principle that a nuclear power does not accept hostile military infrastructure on its border is not Russian exceptionalism. It is the consistent practice of every major power in modern history.

What Russia represents in the current global order is not virtue. It is disruption. It is a major power that has decided it will not accept unipolar Western dominance as the permanent condition of the international system. The consequences of that decision are being paid in Ukrainian blood. The question is who manufactured the conditions that made that collision inevitable.

The Global South Is Watching This Differently

When the UN General Assembly voted to condemn Russia's invasion, the abstentions told a story Western media declined to examine. India abstained. China abstained. South Africa abstained. Brazil abstained. Much of Africa abstained. The countries that abstained collectively represent the majority of the world's population.

Their stated reasons were not pro-Putin. They were explicitly about principle: selective application of international law is not international law. The same Western powers invoking the UN Charter against Russia's violation of Ukrainian sovereignty had violated the sovereignty of Iraq in 2003 without Security Council authorisation. They had bombed Libya into collapse in 2011. They were simultaneously supplying weapons used to kill civilians in Gaza while invoking civilian protection in Kyiv.

The selective moral indignation was visible from the Global South in ways it was not visible from inside it.

[UN General Assembly vote ES-11/1, March 2, 2022: undocs.org]

The Other Flag in the Frame