Of Course Russia Started the War, But was it Provoked by Biden and NATO?

Who started this war? Was it Putin, who invaded Ukraine, or Biden and NATO that provoked Russia and goaded Putin? Did Putin attack Ukraine without provocation, or did the west actually bring on this war by repeatedly threatening Russia with NATO’s continuous expansion on its borders?

No, we are not Russian stooges – as the Russia haters will certainly classify us. The reality is that we, like most Americans, don’t care at all that much about either Russia or Ukraine. At AmericanVantagePoint.com we’re previously written about the fact that we, like most Americans, would like this war to stop – because we want the killing and the destruction to stop – but we really don’t care about the terms of any ceasefire or peace treaty.

Neither Russia nor Ukraine are places that most Americans think about: they are not our allies; they are not our trading partners; we don’t even visit these countries on vacation. In short, we have no affection for, or affiliation with, either country.

But since our government has seen fit to send upwards of $350 billion to Ukraine to prosecute this war, we think it is prudent to ask the very legitimate question, “Who started the war?”

Here’s RFK Jr. explaining his view on US and NATO provocation of Russia over Ukraine during his presidential campaign. Note his conclusion, “We look kind of like the aggressor. That’s the way the rest of the world sees us.”

This interview was published on YouTube on Jan 4, 2024

A Brief History: Relating the Cuban Missile Crisis to Ukraine

First, a very brief side-trip back to October 1962: The Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev placed nuclear missiles on Cuba, aimed at the United States. He did this, he said, to deter a future US invasion of Cuba. President John F. Kennedy was rightfully outraged by the prospect of Soviet nuclear missiles being placed so very close to our borders and he immediately ordered a naval blockade of Cuba, and in a major broadcast address he let Russia know, in no uncertain terms that, “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” We were as close to a nuclear war as we ever have been, but so was the Soviet Union, and Khrushchev blinked, backed down, and removed the missiles. This was all because the USSR dared to place nuclear missiles on our border.

Joe Biden recreated a mirror-image of the Cuban Missile Crisis: He repeatedly urged NATO membership for Ukraine causing Russia to fear that NATO would place nuclear missiles along Ukraine’s border with Russia. Putin’s reaction was similar to JFK’s. This would not be allowed.

“Not One Inch Eastward”

Let’s add to this walk through history the famous quote by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker in 1990 assuring Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would expand “not one inch eastward” (toward Russia), which was one of several assurances made by western leaders to Gorbachev during the process of German unification.

But since 1990 many countries have joined NATO (Poland 1999, Hungary 1999, Czech Republic 1999, Slovenia 2004, Slovakia 2004, Romania 2004, Lithuania 2004, Latvia 2004, Estonia 2004, Bulgaria 2004, Croatia 2009, Albania 2009, Montenegro 2017, North Macedonia 2020, Finland 2023, and Sweden 2024). A quick look at the map will reveal that these countries are east of the reunited Germany.

So the Russians believe the US and its European allies have repeatedly violated the “not one inch eastward” assurance. On the other side, some now say Baker never gave such assurance, or that maybe he did, but it was never given the force of law by being placed in a treaty or other formal agreement. Suffice it to say, right or wrong, the Russians believed they had this assurance.

Ukraine has sought NATO membership since 2008. Its requests have not resulted in membership because of continuing Russian opposition. Its requests for NATO membership, on and off as its governments changed, were never formally granted nor formally denied.

Then in December 2021, as tensions ratcheted-up over the simmering issue of NATO membership for Ukraine, and just before the Russia invasion, President Biden assured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that he would support a request from Ukraine to join the NATO military alliance. Their talks occurred as Russia massed troops near Ukraine for the invasion that later occurred. Russia asserted that both Ukraine and the United States had been engaging in destabilising behaviour, and Russia said it required assurances against NATO’s eastward expansion.

Just prior to its invasion of Ukraine, Russia sent the United States its demands for de-escalating the crisis. They included a binding promise that Ukraine would never become a member of NATO. The Russians also wanted the removal of all NATO troops and weapons from the 14 eastern European countries that had joined NATO since 1997. The demands were seen in the west as extreme and unreasonable.

But, whether extreme or not, they clearly articulated the concern Russia had that NATO was now on its doorstep, and that missiles would be placed on its borders. “There are some concerns on the Russian side that are legitimate,” Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told L.A. Times‘ columnist Doyle McManus. McManus wrote on December 19, 2021, “Putin has complained about American offensive missiles on his border that could reach Moscow in five minutes. There are no such missiles there now, but we could certainly have a conversation about missiles.”

Putin’s concern for Russia’s security was well known in the west. As stated in the referenced McManus’s column in the L.A. Times, the idea of Ukraine joining NATO was “the last straw”:

“Putin has raged against NATO’s steady expansion toward Russia’s borders for more than a decade. He appears to have decided that the alliance’s deepening relationship with Ukraine, which is not a NATO member, is the last straw.

He’s not wrong about how the alliance’s growth has affected Russia’s perception of its security. Thirty years ago, Russia had a buffer zone of satellite states to its west. Now it has only the unimpressive presence of Belarus.

Russia’s western border is NATO’s eastern flank. American and British military advisors serve in Ukraine; U.S. missile defense systems sit in Poland and Romania; and NATO troops conduct exercises in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, once part of the Soviet Union.”

Russia had made it very clear, repeatedly, that Ukraine becoming a NATO member state, and the idea of NATO missiles being placed along its borders, was a national security threat it could not accept.

President Kennedy said the same thing about the Soviet missiles in Cuba in his famous address to the nation on October 22, 1962: “This urgent transformation of Cuba into an important strategic base – by the presence of these large, long-range, and clearly offensive weapons of sudden mass destruction – constitutes an explicit threat to the peace and security of all the Americas …” Kennedy wouldn’t accept Russian missiles in Cuba, and rightfully so, and Putin wouldn’t accept NATO missiles in Ukraine. The parallels can’t be missed.

A Brief Reprise of Ukrainian History – Admittedly Abridged and Incomplete

Ukraine became independent in 1991 with the collapse of the USSR. Previously it was a so-called USSR satellite state, a Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. But when the communist USSR collapsed, the new Russian leadership continued to view Ukraine as being within its sphere of influence. For its part and for many years, Ukraine honored its close ties to Russia and its governments were very pro-Russian.

But there was also a strong desire amongst many Ukrainians to break with Russia and to become more closely tied to Europe. In 2013, demonstrations and civil unrest took over Kiev’s Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti)  These protests were the result of the sudden decision by President Viktor Yanukovych’s not to sign the “European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement,” and to instead reaffirm ties to Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union, an organization of five post-Soviet states.  These protests led to the “Revolution of Dignity” in 2014, following deadly clashes.  President Viktor Yanukovych was removed, and the 2004 Constitution of Ukraine was restored. But the gulf between those who supported aligning with Russia and those who supported a realignment with Europe, resulted in the Russian annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of the first Russo-Ukrainian War in 2014.

While we won’t go into this here, nor do we assert its truthfulness, we note that there is a widespread belief that the 2013-2014 protests in Ukraine were fully funded and engineered by the C.I.A.

Back in 1994, Ukraine, Russia, the UK, and the US had signed the “Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances,” wherein Ukraine agreed to surrender the Soviet nuclear missiles that had been installed within Ukrainian territory (about one-third of the USSR’s nuclear missiles had been located in Ukraine), in exchange for assurances from Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States against threats or the use of force targeting the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.

Many pro-Ukrainians argue that the US has broken the Budapest Agreement by failing to physically defend Ukraine against the Russian invasion. Their assertion raises several issues:

• Are they asserting that Ukraine would have used its nuclear weapons against Russia?  If not, are they any worse off for not having them?
• Are they forgetting that the flip side of the coin was that NATO would not expand “one more inch” to the east?
•  Do they not believe that we have already done enough for Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe?  Or, is there no limit, in their estimation, to our compelled involvement?
• Have they given no weight to the fact that Russia has not used its nuclear weapons against Ukraine?

In the end, there are two competing theories about the whys and wherefores of the Ukrainian War:

In the first analysis, mostly subscribed to in the United States by Democrat politicians and Neo-Cons, Putin is an insufferable belligerent who seeks to restore the old Soviet Union and whose insatiable appetite for war will surely lead to WWIII unless we aggressively meet him on every possible battlefield. Give him an inch and he’ll take a mile. Give him Ukraine and who knows what country he’ll come for tomorrow. “This was … always about naked aggression, about Putin’s desire for empire by any means necessary,” President Joe Biden (Feb. 24, 2022).

The second, opposing, camp takes the position that either (1) Russia actually does have genuine and legitimate security concerns , or that (2) Russia genuinely believes, though mistakenly, that NATO’s eastward expansion is a threat to its security. Those in the second camp generally see Putin as defending his country against the continued growth of a military alliance aimed squarely at Russia.

Both sides in this debate are fully aware that Putin had made it manifestly clear, through many years, that he was very concerned about NATO’s unstopping expansion, that he was getting to the end of his rope, and that further expansion might be seen as warranting a Russian military response.

There’s a third camp to be considered: The people in this group also find Putin insufferable, but they place no value whatever in the explanation that Russia has invaded Ukraine because of its security concerns over an ever-expanding NATO. Rather the people in this camp take the position that Putin believes Ukraine is an illegitimate country and that that its land has historically belonged to Russia.

But this discussion would certainly not be complete without at least a mention of how Volodymyr Zelenskyy got to be President of Ukraine. He was educated as a lawyer, but worked as an actor and a comedian. He acted on the popular TV series “Servant of the People,” where his character fought corruption and became the president of Ukraine. Zelenskyy was not involved in politics until he ran for president in 2018 as the candidate of the “Servant of the People Party,” a name he reused from his TV series. He won 73 percent of the vote, beating the then incumbent Petro Poroshenko, who trailed far behind with 24%. Zelenskyy’s elected term ended last year, but he cancelled the scheduled election and has unilaterally extended his presidency. Mr. Trump has called Zelenskyy a “modestly successful comedian” who had become a “dictator,” and who “refuses” to have elections.  The American media generally gives Zelenskyy a pass on this, claiming that because Ukraine is at war, it is under martial law, and thus can’t hold elections. Who’s right and who’s wrong may be a question that depends upon the Ukrainian Constitution, and we will readily admit that we have zero expertise in the interpretation of the Ukrainian Constitution or any other Ukrainian law.

America’s a free country and we’re each fully entitled to believe anything and anyone we want. But it is useful to have some information, and to give it some thought, before reaching a conclusion. As we stated at the beginning of this piece, most Americans don’t really care about Ukraine or Russia. They want the war to stop, but they are not invested in the terms of the ceasefire or peace treaty.

Many Americans feel they have been fed a non-stop diet, by certain politicians, by the media, and by academia, of anti-Russian, pro-Ukrainian propaganda. Under this narrative, Putin is evil, and Zelenskyy is among the pantheon of the greatest leaders of all times, right up there with Winston Churchill.

But it’s just not that simple.

We hope you’ll now see what a complex and twisted tale Ukraine presents. And we take the position that this quagmire is none of our business and that we need to extricate ourselves from this morass without delay.

One lingering thought. The US and Ukraine have been discussing an economic agreement under which US companies would mine Ukrainian rare-earths. Mr. Trump suggests that this agreement could “repay” the US for the $350 billion it gave to Ukraine without any repayment promises. So, should we remain involved in order to mine Ukraine’s “rare-earths”? That, of course, really depends upon how rare they really are and whether we might get them elsewhere without all the entanglement presented in a continuing relationship with Ukraine.