By Marc Champion*

Lately, I’ve been reading the posts I usually avoid on X, ex-Twitter – the ones that parrot misinformation. Some of these accounts have hundreds of thousands of followers, including names like Elon Musk or economist Jeffrey Sachs, so you can assume that much of what they write is true.

With US President-elect Donald Trump expected to quickly try to end the war in Ukraine after taking office, I want to address the scariest myth of all: That it’s all the fault of the aggressive West.

According to this narrative, which has gained ground throughout the global South mainly, the Russia it is a victim of Western colonialism and was moved to invade Ukraine by two outrageous provocations: NATO’s hostile eastward expansion and, in 2014, a CIA-orchestrated coup in Kiev that threatened the country’s ethnic Russian minority with “extermination.” This matters because, if true, all it would take to stop the bloodshed is for the West to close the door on NATO and stop sending weapons to Ukraine. But these decisions would only help the Kremlin achieve its goals of territorial conquest.

Russia is a victim of colonialist Western powers

In terms of colonialism, Russia is as western as it gets. Its history has been one of uninterrupted and remarkably successful imperial expansion, interspersed with brief interludes of military defeat and imperial collapse. Thus the Soviet Union ended up covering one-sixth of the planet’s area.

This creates a real problem. Because the Russian and Soviet empires were successive—unlike the British, for example—most Russians aren’t really sure where their country should end. Nor is it clear to them why people who speak Russian as a first language can be anything but Russian. If in doubt, read the lengthy essay written by the Russian president Vladimir Putin for Ukraine in 2021 and which he then gave to the officers he sent to invade the following year.

What worries the peoples of Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, as well as the Baltic states and (quietly) Kazakhstan, is that the independence they finally regained in 1991 may turn out to be just another break in this expansionist history of Russia . The former possessions clamoring to join NATO did so to protect themselves from the Moscow backlash they feared would eventually come. And it came.

NATO expansion forced Putin to respond

It is true that when the Soviet Union was negotiating with Washington over whether a reunified Germany could remain in NATO, verbal assurances were given that this would not be used to expand the alliance eastward at Moscow’s expense.

These commitments were made to the Soviet Union, not Russia. Why does this distinction matter? (Moscow is Moscow, after all.) Because when borders move 1,300 kilometers, so do reasonable expectations of security. And because, when American and European officials were making these assurances to former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, there was no independent Estonia, Georgia, Moldova or Ukraine with their own security concerns. When empires fall, maps and conditions change.

The collapse of the Soviet Union required new treaties and written agreements to account for the 15 new countries created. One of these was the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which France, Russia, the US and the UK guaranteed the sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine (and separately Belarus and Kazakhstan) in exchange for Kyiv’s resignation from its nuclear arsenal.

Another new arrangement was the 1996 founding act on mutual relations, cooperation and security between NATO and the Russian Federation. In this agreement, NATO committed – among other things – to integrate the new members of the former Soviet bloc by creating the infrastructure needed for conventional reinforcement in the event of an emergency, “despite additional permanent deployment of significant combat forces”. The troop build-up was perceived to be provocative – extending Article 5 protection, without changing NATO’s force posture, was a deterrent.

These were the agreed rules between NATO and Russia – not the verbal assurances given to Gorbachev, the leader of another country. NATO kept its commitments until Russia no longer did. The alliance did not build any bases on the territories of its new eastern members until Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. And no, it did not and still has not built military bases in Ukraine. When Kremlin officials bother to offer evidence for this claim, they point to training centers – training centers are not military bases – try launching an attack from such a center and you’ll see why.

Indeed, there have been joint NATO exercises (albeit on a much smaller scale than the Russian ones), and elements of a ballistic missile defense system have been deployed in Poland and Romania. However, there was no real threat to the security of Russian soil that could possibly justify invading a neighbor.

What is clear is that in 2014 Putin annexed Crimea and started an insurgency in eastern Ukraine. At first he said that the troops without insignia and the tanks that suddenly appeared in Crimea were not Russian, but that was a lie. He, and Russian television, said ethnic Russians were under attack and that trains full of armed fascists from western Ukraine were on their way. That was also a lie. I was there. The only thugs were Russian security officers in long leather coats, and the only people beaten were Crimean Tatars and children foolish enough to hold Ukrainian flags.

There were indeed demonstrations against the new, post-Maidan revolution government in Kiev, all the way from Odesa to Kharkiv, which Putin called “Novorossiya” or New Russia. However, these concentrations were mostly small, around 1,000-2,000 people. In Donetsk, where I was also present, hundreds had come by bus from Russia, I was told. So they would occupy a government building, put up flags and then disappear, leaving the authorities to clean up and replace the flags until the following weekend. The protests were going nowhere, because although many people in the region -at the time- sympathized with Russia, they had no interest in fighting to join it.

“I was the one who pulled the trigger on this war,” Igor Girkin, the former Russian intelligence officer who helped organize the events in Crimea and then moved to eastern Ukraine, told the Russian nationalist newspaper Zavtra (Tomorrow) at the time. “If our unit had not crossed the border, everything would have expired – like in Kharkiv, like in Odessa.” Girkin is a Russian citizen and ultra-nationalist who became the first Minister of Defense of the breakaway “Donetsk People’s Republic”. His sharp criticism of Putin’s (in his view weak) handling of the 2022 invasion has since landed him in prison.

Putin just wants Ukraine to be neutral

The irony here is that by mid-2014, support for Ukraine joining NATO was negligible and the alliance itself was no longer interested. Neutrality was written into Ukraine’s constitution, a clause that was not removed until December 2014, a full nine months after Crimea was annexed and Putin created a conflict in the Donbass.

The Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky offered to renew this neutrality at the March-April 2022 peace talks. Much emphasis has been placed on whether then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson persuaded Ukraine to abort those negotiations. But this is a distraction.

Putin has never simply called for military neutrality. The abandoned draft agreement still included Russian demands to more than halve the size of Ukraine’s armed forces to 85,000 troops, to similarly reduce its fleets of tanks and armored vehicles, and to bar Kiev from receiving foreign military aid or possesses missiles with a range of more than 40 kilometers. This is the demilitarization Russia continues to demand and would leave Ukraine permanently vulnerable to invasion or destabilization. This would be tantamount to capitulation and the end of Ukrainian independence. No leader in Kiev could accept such a deal and survive.

The Maidan revolution was a CIA coup

No, it wasn’t. The American intelligence services are certainly capable of overthrowing governments, but they cannot pay millions of people to spend months on the street in sub-zero temperatures, braving tear gas, water cannons and sniper bullets. As in Georgia now, ordinary people have ideas and take action. They will react if you try to deprive them of their dreams, or if they are enraged by the massive corruption and bloodshed.

Indeed, then acting US Secretary of State Victoria Nuland handed out cakes on Maidan Square. Yes, she spoke to the then US ambassador in Kiev about her preferred choice to lead an opposition government – I’d be shocked if those conversations didn’t happen. But neither was this evidence of a CIA conspiracy or coup… So the next time someone is talking about how Russia should be given what it wants in Ukraine because NATO aggression is the problem or that if the Ukrainians they only promised neutrality and stopped oppressing their Russian population, it would all be over, please keep in mind what really happened.

*Marc Champion is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East.