As someone who studied geopolitics in university and works in the field, it was unnecessary.
Russia’s own actions caused Eastern Europe to join NATO. Putin invading Ukraine has made neutral countries join NATO and brought the organisation closer than it’s been since the Cold War.
When it comes to Europe, the West is almost always on the right side of conflicts. WWI, WWII, Cold War, Yugoslavian War etc.
The problem is that the West is almost always the aggressor everywhere else in the world.
I'll have to write an effortpost to explain everything.
The contest for Ukraine didn't start in 2014, it commenced in early 2008. With oil prices high and Putin’s rule entrenched, Russia began to turn abroad. While Russia moved for Georgia, the West moved to attract Ukraine into its orbit, with the launch of the European Union’s Eastern Partnership and US encouragement for a NATO membership bid.
From this point on, tensions over Ukraine were always likely to mount. But over the next 14 years, the EU and its member states pursued a dangerously confused set of initiatives. Their failure to align legal, security and financial policy created the context in which war became possible. In legal terms, the EU pursued a strategy of attraction. Through its Eastern Partnership, the EU encouraged slow but steady convergence of Ukraine’s legal, political, and economic order toward European standards. Making its geopolitical intentions clear, the EU emphasized that Ukraine would have to choose between Brussels and Moscow.
On security policy, by contrast, division reigned. Some EU states wanted Ukraine to join NATO, others opposed it. These were too weak to deter Russia, yet too threatening for the Kremlin to ignore. Ambiguity became a formula for escalation. At two crucial points when Ukraine most needed financial support, Europe left it out in the cold.
First, like most of Eastern Europe, Ukraine received scant attention during the 2008 global financial crisis. With half of all Ukrainian pre-crisis loans denominated in foreign currencies, a dollar or euro swap line would have gone a long way towards preventing a financial collapse. But while the US was providing a dollar swap line for Mexico, the eurozone was unwilling to extend similar assistance to EU members Poland and Hungary, let alone to Ukraine.
Desperate for dollars and euros, Ukraine had no choice but to turn to the International Monetary Fund and austerity. This fuelled a 15% decline in GDP, an inflation rate of 22%, and an unabated crisis in Ukraine’s steel industry, which helped the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych win the 2010 presidential election. Yanukovych immediately turned to the Kremlin for financial support, trading an extension of Russia’s lease on the Sevastopol naval base in Crimea for a 30% reduction in the price Ukraine paid for Russian gas. By late 2013, Ukraine was facing insolvency and recession.
Recognizing the opportunity, Russia made Ukraine a strategic offer: US$12 billion per year of subsidies and economic benefits if the country abandoned the association agreement—or an escalation of sanctions, should Yanukovych sign the pact. Europe’s economic and financial experts failed to register either Russia’s seriousness or Ukraine’s predicament. Blind to facts on the ground and to the geopolitical consequences of its penny-pinching, the EU made a counteroffer of €610 million ($670 million), less than a tenth of Russia’s proposed assistance.
Pressured by the Kremlin and low-balled by the EU, Yanukovych abandoned the Association Agreement, instead accepting further gas discounts and a $15 billion concessionary loan from Russia. This, too, might not have spelled war had Europe’s rejection been wholesale. But, while Yanukovych was trying to navigate Europe’s financial stinginess, the Ukrainian people had been won over by the EU’s legal attraction. This led to Yanukovych being violently and unconstitutionally ousted and him being shot at while leaving Kyiv
Europe’s offer to Ukraine was legally attractive, militarily ambivalent, and financially mean. It was too expansive for Russia to be at ease, too weak on defense to provide effective deterrence, and too penny-pinching to keep fickle Ukrainian elites on a pro-EU course when it mattered most. Devoid of an overall strategy, Europe’s approach was a recipe for disaster.
The US always played a part in Ukraine, Michael McFaul writing in WaPo in 2004 about the Orange Revolution:
"Did Americans meddle in the internal affairs of Ukraine? Yes. The American agents of influence would prefer different language to describe their activities -- democratic assistance, democracy promotion, civil society support, etc. -- but their work, however labeled, seeks to influence political change in Ukraine."
William Burns, who is now the head of the CIA, but was the US ambassador to Moscow at the time of the Bucharest summit, wrote a memo to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that describes Russian thinking about this matter. In his words:
“Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” NATO, he said,
“would be seen … as throwing down the strategic gauntlet. Today’s Russia will respond. Russian-Ukrainian relations will go into a deep freeze...It will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.”
The EU/US has pushed forward policies toward Ukraine that put it on a crash course with Russia, this much is clear.
