“NATO pushed Russia into a corner”
In 2008 NATO said Ukraine would one day become a member, but refused to give it a membership plan. In February 2022 no member state was proposing to let Ukraine in, and every NATO leader said so in public. Ukraine’s own neutrality law had been in force from 2010 to 2014, and Russia invaded Crimea anyway.
The best test came afterwards. When Finland joined NATO in 2023, Russia’s border with NATO more than doubled. If NATO next door were really an existential threat, Moscow would have rushed troops there. Instead, according to Finnish intelligence reported by Yle in 2024, about 80% of the soldiers and equipment at Russia’s bases near Finland had been sent to fight in Ukraine. Russia is now rebuilding forces there, but only after years of leaving that border almost empty. Russia does not fear NATO attacking it. It fears NATO stopping it.
“Ukraine is run by Nazis”
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is a Russian-speaking Jew whose grandfather fought the Nazis in the Red Army. He won the 2019 election with 73% of the vote. In the parliamentary election that year the far-right Svoboda party, backed by the other far-right groups, got about 2%, far below the 5% threshold; it won a single constituency seat. Far-right parties do far better in most EU countries, and in Russia itself neo-Nazi groups such as Rusich fight on Russia’s side.
“Denazification” was never about Nazis. In the Kremlin’s language it means removing a Ukrainian government and a Ukrainian identity that Moscow does not control.
“We are protecting Russian speakers”
The cities Russia destroyed first and hardest were Russian-speaking: Mariupol, Kharkiv, Sievierodonetsk, Bakhmut. Russian speakers in Ukraine were never banned from speaking Russian; they were bombed for living in Ukraine. Millions of them fled west, into the rest of Ukraine and the EU, not east to Russia.
“Ukraine broke the Minsk agreements”
The Minsk agreements of 2014–2015 were signed under Russian guns after Russian regular troops beat the Ukrainian army at Ilovaisk and Debaltseve. Russia, which signed them, kept denying it was even a party to the war it was fighting, kept its soldiers and weapons in the Donbas, and never let Ukraine control its own border. Then, on 21 February 2022, Putin declared the agreements dead himself by recognising the “people’s republics”.
What the war is really about
Putin has told us himself. In July 2021 he published a long essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, arguing that Ukraine has no right to exist as a separate nation. In his speech of 21 February 2022 he said modern Ukraine was “entirely created by Russia”. In June 2022 he compared himself to Peter the Great, who “returned” land to Russia. The “annexation” of four Ukrainian regions in September 2022, written into Russia’s constitution, says the same thing: this is about territory and about ending Ukraine as an independent state.
There is one more fact that matters. In 1994, in the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine gave up the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world. In return Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom promised to respect its borders. Russia broke that promise in 2014 and again in 2022. Every country that is thinking about whether to trust a treaty or build a bomb has noticed.
Sources
- Putin, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” (2021), and its reception
- Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances (1994)
- Minsk agreements
- Finland–NATO relations (Wikipedia); Yle, June 2024, on Russia’s emptied bases near Finland (report via Ukrainska Pravda)
- 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary election, official results