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    Why The Ukraine Crisis Is The West's Fault PDF

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    Pedro Mendes Martins

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    Why The Ukraine Crisis Is The West's Fault PDF

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    130 views5 pages

    Why The Ukraine Crisis Is The West's Fault PDF

    Uploaded by

    Pedro Mendes Martins

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 5

    Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the

    West’s Fault
    The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin
    By John J. Mearsheimer September/October 2014

    Play Audio

    A man takes a picture as he stands on a Soviet-style star re-touched with blue paint so that it resembles
    the Ukrainian flag, Moscow, August 20, 2014.
    Maxim Shemetov / Courtesy Reuters

    A
    Thisccording to the prevailing
    site uses cookies wisdom
    to improve your in the West,
    user experience. the
    Click Ukraine
    here to learn
    more.
    crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression.
    CONTINUE
    Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed
    and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other
    countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian
    President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a
    pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of
    Ukraine.

    But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies
    share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble
    is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move
    Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. At the
    same time, the EU’s expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the
    pro-democracy movement in Ukraine -- beginning with the Orange
    Revolution in 2004 -- were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s,
    Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in
    recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while
    their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion.
    For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and
    pro-Russian president -- which he rightly labeled a “coup” -- was the
    final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared
    would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine
    until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.

    Putin’s pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West
    had been moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its core
    strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly.
    Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events
    only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics.
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    CONTINUE
    They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in
    the twenty-first century and that Europe

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    CONTINUE
    The West Should Arm Ukraine
    Here’s Why—And How
    Alexander J. Motyl

    A Grand Bargain with Russia


    What It Would Take to Get the Kremlin to Cooperate
    Vladislav Inozemtsev and Anton Barbashin

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