Who started the Ukraine war?: NATO expansion critics

The cable they read and ignored

Burns sent it February 1, 2008. Four pages, classified. He did not hedge. Ukrainian NATO membership is the brightest of all redlines for the entire Russian political class. Not a Putin problem. A Russia problem. He sent it to the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of State went to Bucharest four months later and pushed for a membership declaration anyway.

Some of us have been saying this since 1997, when George Kennan — the architect of containment, not a dove — called NATO expansion the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era. We said it when it was academic. We said it when the tanks rolled. Being right did not prevent anything.

We are not apologists for Putin. The invasion was illegal. Bucha was real. But moral clarity about the invasion is not strategic clarity about the sequence. In 1999, NATO expanded to Poland. In 2004, to the Baltics. Each round, Moscow objected. Each round, the objections were overridden. Extending a military alliance to the doorstep of a nuclear power, against its explicit, repeated objections, produced exactly the crisis every realist framework predicted.

The Russian revanchism analysts insist Putin would have invaded regardless. But a neutral Ukraine with Western economic integration — the Finland model — was discussed seriously and abandoned without being tried. Both American political factions were committed to expansion. Nobody can prove the model would have worked. The path that was chosen produced a quarter-million dead.

The Ukrainian agency camp reminds us that Ukrainians chose Europe. We respect that. We also observe that the choice was made inside a geopolitical structure that offered no safe path to exercise it.

Where we concede ground: We cannot explain Georgia. Russia invaded it in 2008 with no NATO timeline in sight.

What would change our mind: Declassified Russian invasion plans for Ukraine dating to before the 2008 Bucharest summit.

Read the full synthesis: Who started the Ukraine war?