After acknowledging their vulnerability as Russian neighboring nations, the invitation and further confirmation for NATO membership to Finland and Sweden marked a historic shift in their “neutral, peaceful” position and identity. Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia has vehemently opposed this decision by saying it “would not bring stability to Europe,”seeing NATO as a security threat. Head of the Chechen Republic and critical ally to Putin, Ramzan Kadyrov, labelled in a televised address that the fight was not against Ukraine but against NATO and the West for Russia. 

According to Russia, the increase of NATO members close to its borders resulted in them not feeling “safe, (to) develop and exist” because it was part of what the Kremlin called the “simply unacceptable” anti-Russia project led by the West to antagonise them. On top of that, Vladimir Putin revealed in 2021 the way he views Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty, and statehood as a former Soviet nation, saying “Russians and Ukrainians were one people - a single whole” relying on historical, ethnic, economic, religious and even cultural explanations with Moscow as a reunifying force which was consolidated up until the collapse of the Soviet Union. After all, this supports and explains Russia’s opposition to the United States and NATO’s spread into the former Soviet bloc. 

Thus, when NATO’s expansion in Eastern Europe drove many ex-Soviet states to turn to the West, with both the EU and NATO, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania realised becoming NATO members in 2004 and Ukraine aimed to achieve since 2014, it directly provoked Russia. This is because NATO membership to any former Soviet states like Georgia but more specifically Ukraine “would be a hostile act toward Russia,” according to Putin. This fear on Russia’s end was confirmed and aggravated in NATO’s 2008 Bucharest Summit when NATO revealed “its intent to admit Georgia and Ukraine” in the future. When both Georgia and Ukraine expressed an interest in the 2000s in joining NATO through the Membership Action Plan, receiving support from the US as a leading NATO member, and this was reinforced in 2014 by Ukraine after seeing the local protests and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the Russian-Ukraine tensions intensified progressively. 

The separatist rebellion sparked by the Kremlin in 2014 in the Crimea region in Ukraine, which claimed 14,000 lives, was just the beginning of the conflict that unveiled the war with Russia’s military operation to invade Ukraine on the 24th of February 2022. The illegal annexation of Crimea, breaching the 1994 Budapest Memorandum treaty agreeing to respect Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty, and borders, took place on March 18th, 2014, after Ukraine’s ‘Revolution of Dignity’ in February 2014 brought “a pro-Western government” to power after removing former President Viktor Yanukovych. From the Crimea region to the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Donbas, Russia violated the territorial sovereignty and integrity of Ukraine with the annexation and separatist-declared independence, and much more aggressively with the later invasion and war on Ukraine. After this, the general support for Ukraine’s NATO membership increased from 30% in 2014 to 56% in early 2021, which can be argued to have provoked Putin’s aggression more and resulted in further Russian hostility. In Putin’s view, the Russian intervention of Ukraine, and other former Soviet bloc members for that matter, is merely an act of protection and defense of Russian citizens in those regions. These claims are reinstated to the current Russia-Ukraine war because the military action into Ukraine was said to be “unavoidable” in front of the “sprouts of nationalism and neo-Nazism” that were endangering the Russian civilians living in Ukraine. 

The 2014 Ukraine crisis continued escalating with failed attempts of diplomatic talks and stalled agreements of the Minsk peace accords, Putin has continued focusing on and demanding the ban on Ukraine’s NATO membership and the reduction of weapons and troops provided by NATO into its eastern flank. This basically sums up Putin’s demands and interest in taking NATO’s international presence and influence back to how it was in 1997 prior to the eastward expansionto limit further NATO expansion. Although many argue that Putin’s antagonism towards Ukraine has to do with a defensive reaction to Western expansion and NATO’s spread, most Western observers fear it could point to Russia’s revival as an empire. 

Nonetheless, what is being seen as the war develops is that Putin’s demands and reasons for the military operation to overrun the Western and NATO expansion into Ukraine were “a big strategic mistake” because he is getting “more NATO on his border, and more members,” as NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said. However, the possibility of the request the Ukraine President, Volodymyr Zelensky, made to become an EU member mid-fight materialising with the support from current EU members and President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen could still enrage Russian aggression to stop a ‘Western-leaning’ Ukraine.

Ultimately, it cannot be denied that the ‘Open-Door’ policy that NATO, the United States, and its Western allies have committed, resulting in the eastward expansion, has broken the alleged “not move an inch to the East” promise made in the 1990s between Gorbachev and Baker. As prominent political scientist and realist John Mearsheimer has argued, the United States and its allies pushing the expansion of NATO and EU to the East makes “the West, especially the United States, principally responsible for this disaster.” This is because even though Russia is to blame for starting the war and responsible for its nature, the West, under American and NATO leadership, increasingly fostering the “reckless expansion of NATO (that) provoked Russia,” makes them heavily responsible for the root cause of the crisis.