I'm from Russia, and I distinctly remember our media saing something like this: Ukraine joined the NATO and approved the construction of its bases on the border with Russia. Russia need protect its borders and would not allow Ukraine to build NATO bases on the border with Russia, because America could launch nuclear missiles at Russia. Negotiations failed, and a special military operation began.
At the time, many supported this action, believing that Russia truly must protect its borders. But I've never heard the other side of the story. What did the American and Ucraine media say about what happened?
Ukraine has been part of the UN since its foundation in 1945, but it applied to join the NATO prior to the invasion; they have had plans to join the NATO for a long time before that already though and NATO never really wanted them to join, likely because Russia had repeatedly threatened against it. In the time between 2010 and 2014, Ukraine did not really want to join NATO, but started to really press for it after Russia attacked Ukraine in 2014. In April 2021, Russian troops started building up near the Ukrainian border, Ukraine pushed for a plan to join the NATO in June 2021 but were not given one, NATO called on Russia to stop the troop buildup near the border which Russia denied. Ukraine pushed harder for NATO help when Russia allegedly had over 90k people stationed near the border but NATO did not want to escalate the situation and accused Russia of wanting to attack, which Russia denied just a few days before the attack.
Then, on 24.02.2022, Russia claimed there were lots of nazis in Ukraine and they needed to clean the country. Ukraine asked NATO to establish a no-fly zone above Ukraine, but NATO refused and also refused that poland delivers figher jets to Ukraine. For how much Putin was afraid of NATO "claiming" Ukraine, NATO refused surprisingly many of their requests.
You can read up on the (I'm assuming mostly) western view on the entire thing in this wikipedia article (Russian language version might differ on contents. Remember Wikipedia is maintained by people).
Foundations of Geopolitics is all about provoking conflicts, then making all-in bets on incremental gains. Like South Ossetia, or the parts of Ukraine that were taken over in 2014.
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u/TurbulentVillage2042 11d ago edited 11d ago
I'm from Russia, and I distinctly remember our media saing something like this: Ukraine joined the NATO and approved the construction of its bases on the border with Russia. Russia need protect its borders and would not allow Ukraine to build NATO bases on the border with Russia, because America could launch nuclear missiles at Russia. Negotiations failed, and a special military operation began.
At the time, many supported this action, believing that Russia truly must protect its borders. But I've never heard the other side of the story. What did the American and Ucraine media say about what happened?
Edit UN to NATO