https://transnational.live/2022/05/28/jack-matlock-ukraine-crisis-should-have-been-avoided/
A tour de force review of the Ukrainian situation and how we got here by former US Ambassador to the Soviet Union and career diplomat Jack Matlock.
“So far as Ukraine is concerned, U.S. intrusion into its domestic politics was deep—to the point of seeming to select a prime minister. It also, in effect, supported an illegal coup d’etat that changed the Ukrainian government in 2014, a procedure not normally considered consistent with the rule of law or democratic governance.”
The growth of NATO, due to central European nations knowing that Russia continuously invades her neighbors, and banding together may very well be Putin’s excuse for invading Ukraine. But that doesn’t justify it.
Independent sovereign nations are free and entitled to make their own security decisions and alliances.
When the USSR collapsed, the ex “Warsaw Pact” countries of Eastern Europe didn’t trust the new, but largely unimproved, Russia to not want them “back in the fold” again, at some point & made a mad scramble to also join this effective defence network. It turns out they were SO right, as Pooptin has proved since 2008
The traditionally non-aligned Sweden & Finland now see the advantages of changing their stance too, thanks to Vladolf’s transparent “World Domination” fetish.
Matlock’s suggestion that Russia which has tons of territory needs buffer states under its thumb to “feel secure” is daft — then by that reckoning Canada should have the northern states as buffer and Mexico should have Texas etc. as “buffer”