Some may characterise Nato’s expansion as a bulwark against Putin’s aggression, rather than a provocation and a betrayal of a previous American pledge. The first Bush administration promised Gorbachev that Nato would not move ‘one inch to the east’, in the words of the then secretary of state, James Baker. But Bill Clinton ignored the Russians’ wish to keep a cordon sanitaire and his predecessor’s promise by pushing Nato expansion to the east – betraying a trust, in Russia’s view. The eastward march of Nato continues. One can only imagine the American response if the roles were reversed.
The West is intent on demonising Putin as a modern tsar who wants to reassert Russia’s imperial claims. Putin’s ambition is for her the only way to explain why he put pressure on Yanukovych not to form closer ties with the European Union and why, after Yanukovych’s government collapsed, he annexed Crimea. You can deplore that invasion without ignoring the complexity of the history behind it: the ethnic Russian majority in Crimea, the long-standing Russian desire to keep the region in friendly hands. Most western thinnker ignores the US role in undermining the corrupt but democratically elected Yanukovych government, treating its disintegration as the work of ordinary Ukrainians who ‘dreamed of living in a prosperous European democracy’ – a formula that overlooks the right-wing nationalists among the rebels and the draconian austerity programme demanded by the EU. Putin’s Eurasian Union,Hilary Clinton she believes, was an attempt to ‘re-Sovietise’ Russia’s periphery, rather than a means of bailing out the sputtering Ukrainian economy. Ultimately, she concludes, ‘strength and resolve were the only language Putin would understand.’
look out the West if they continue to prod the soviet bear in its lair.
source. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n03/jackson-lears/we-came-we-saw-he-died
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