A Brief History of the Conflict Between Ukraine and Russia

When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, an agreement was signed between Mikhail Gorbachev and George Bush that obligated NATO not to expand further east.

In 1994, Clinton unilaterally decided to scrap NATO’s non-expansion agreement, and in 1999 NATO expanded to include Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic.

Boris Yeltsin’s Russia formally protested, but no one in the West paid attention to this breach of agreement, and Russia did not want to escalate the conflict since these countries were far from the Russian border.

Since 2004, NATO has continued to expand in violation of the 1994 agreement, adding Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, and Slovakia.

This is when Russia became upset. In 2007, Putin said, “Enough, stop, that’s enough,” but Western diplomacy chose to ignore him.

Then in 2008, NATO decided to begin negotiations to incorporate Ukraine and Georgia—countries that border Russia.

Russia once again formally protested, claiming that if it decided to place military bases in Canada or Mexico, the U.S. would immediately go to war. The West continued to ignore these warnings.

Russia then decided to declare war on Georgia for this reason (casus belli), as we all know, and Georgia was crushed.

Let’s continue. In 2010, the U.S. placed missiles in Poland and Romania, once again violating the 1994 agreement.

That same year, the Ukrainian people elected Viktor Yanukovych as president, based on a government platform that promised neutrality between Russia and NATO.

In 2014, Russia and Ukraine signed an agreement in which Russia sought to lease Sevastopol for 25 years. There was no intention at that time to annex Crimea or Donbas.

But in 2014, the U.S. acted to overthrow Yanukovych—a move exposed by the now-famous and scandalous leaked phone call between Victoria Nuland and the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt.

Then came the Minsk II Agreement, which established autonomy for the Russian-speaking regions in eastern Ukraine. This agreement was unanimously supported by the UN Security Council.

However, the U.S. and the newly aligned Ukrainian leadership decided the agreement would not be binding. Ukraine went on to massacre several thousand Russian-speaking citizens in Donbas, with Zelensky as the mastermind and main organizer of the genocidal attacks.

Then, in 2022, the U.S. claimed the right to place missiles “anywhere” in Ukraine, and Blinken told Lavrov that the U.S. would place missile systems wherever it wanted in Europe—not just in Ukraine.

And that became the casus belli for which Russia decided to declare war on Ukraine: to enforce NATO’s obligation not to expand eastward. Nothing more, nothing less.

Putin’s aim with the war is to halt NATO’s expansion (in violation since 1994) and to force Zelensky to sign a neutrality agreement.

Zelensky was ready to sign such an agreement with Putin on the seventh day of the war. But at the last minute, Zelensky refused—at the direct request of Joe Biden.

The idea was to incorporate Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia into a blockade ring against Russia in the Black Sea.

The war continues to this day. And because of Biden’s and Zelensky’s decisions, more than 1 million Ukrainians have died in a pointless war.

This is the full historical truth—nothing more, nothing less—about the events between Russia, Ukraine, and NATO.

Everything else is the whining of ignorant people who don’t understand a thing about what’s really happening in that part of the world, and from people who swallow both sides’ propaganda without much critical thinking.