Provoked

Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine by Scott Horton, The Libertarian Institute, 2024. 

At many times and in many ways, although not with a formal treaty, the United States promised Russia that, with the exception of East Germany, NATO would never extend eastward to include the former Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe. The United States promised that if Russia allowed East Germany and West Germany to join into a single country, then only East Germany would become part of NATO. Putin's view of Ukraine is that Western Ukraine is part of Eastern Europe, while Eastern Ukraine is part of Russia. In other words, Ukraine is an artificial country with the boundary between the two ethnicities running through the middle of the country. Russia itself originated in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, and later expanded northward to Moscow. Ukraine has never been purely ethnic Ukrainian. It has always had Poles in the West (Galicia), Russians in the East, and Tatars in the south. It also had a lot of Jews, before the Holocaust. The author's thesis is that NATO expansion provoked Russia to invade Ukraine, and that some individuals had warned about this possibility in advance. Some of these opponents of NATO expansion:

• Pat Buchanan

• Thomas L. Friedman

• George Kennan

• Charles Kupchan

• Edward Luttwak

• Michael Mandelbaum

• Daniel Patrick Moynihan

• Richard Pipes

• Brent Scowcroft