Who started the Ukraine war?: Ukrainian agency

We are not your buffer zone

Every Western analysis of this war has a protagonist problem. The expansion critics star the United States. The revanchism analysts star Putin. The structural camp stars the system. In all three versions, Ukraine is the terrain the story happens on. Forty-four million people reduced to the geography between two arguments.

We chose. In 2004, the Orange Revolution was not a CIA plot. It was Ukrainians standing in freezing rain because their election had been stolen. In 2014, Maidan was not a Western-sponsored coup. It was students who got beaten by riot police and then a million people who showed up the next day because the beating was the last straw. Victoria Nuland’s phone call is the critics’ favorite evidence. A diplomat expressing preferences is not the same as a diplomat staging a revolution. We were there. The Americans were not the main characters.

The NATO expansion critics say we should have stayed neutral. They are asking us to accept permanently subordinated sovereignty to avoid upsetting a neighbor who was going to invade us anyway — because Russia also invaded Georgia, which had no NATO timeline. The Finland model works for Finland because Finland was never part of Russia’s identity narrative. We were.

The Russian revanchism analysts see what we see: an imperial project. We part company on the implication that Western recognition of that project relieves us of agency. We do not need the West to diagnose our oppressor. We need the West to deliver the weapons it promised.

The structural inevitability camp says the system had no circuit breaker. We were the circuit breaker. We just were not supposed to fight back.

Where we concede ground: Our institutions were corrupt. Oligarchs captured the state for decades after independence.

What would change our mind: Evidence that neutrality would have prevented invasion given Russia’s pattern in Georgia and Moldova.

Read the full synthesis: Who started the Ukraine war?