In February 2022, the West told itself a comforting story: that Vladimir Putin woke up one morning, unprovoked, and decided to invade Ukraine. History, in this version, began on the day Russian tanks rolled across the border. The invasion was cast as inexplicable, an act of madness by a man compared in the same breath to Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and, when convenient, a feeble tyrant dying of cancer. The contradictions never mattered, because the narrative was useful. But history did not begin in 2022. The seeds of this war were sown long before, and if we are honest enough to trace them, we will see that this was not an “unprovoked” war—it was one long in the making, nurtured by Western arrogance, shortsightedness, and a refusal to take Russia at its word.
Russia’s warnings were not secret. In 1997, George Kennan—the architect of Cold War containment—warned that NATO expansion into Eastern Europe would be “the most fateful error of American policy.” In 2008, U.S. Ambassador William Burns cabled Washington with a blunt assessment of what Ukrainian membership in NATO would mean: “Nyet means nyet. Ukraine’s accession is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite.” And in 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, Putin himself told a room full of Western leaders that NATO’s relentless eastward expansion was unacceptable, a threat to Russian security. He did not whisper it. He declared it.
For three decades, the West ignored him. NATO crept steadily eastward: Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary in 1999; the Baltics in 2004; Romania and Bulgaria soon after. At every stage, Russia protested, and at every stage the West waved those protests away as paranoia. By 2008, NATO went further still, issuing a statement in Bucharest declaring that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO.” That was the moment Russia understood that the West had no intention of honoring its red line. And yet Western capitals acted surprised in 2014, when Russia responded with fury to Ukraine’s sudden pivot away from Moscow.
The real break came not in 2022 but in 2014. Western media sold the Maidan uprising as a spontaneous, organic revolution of the Ukrainian people. In reality, it was assisted, shaped, and in some ways orchestrated by Washington. Victoria Nuland, then Assistant Secretary of State, was caught on tape calmly handpicking Ukraine’s post-Yanukovych government—“Yats is the guy,” she told U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt—before dismissing Brussels’ role in the process with the infamous phrase, “F*** the EU.” This was not the language of neutrality. This was the voice of an empire arranging its pieces on the board. And it was not subtle. Senator John McCain even flew to Kyiv to stand with the protesters in Maidan Square, a gesture unthinkable in reverse. Imagine a Russian senator on the ground in Ferguson during the Black Lives Matter protests. Americans would have called it foreign subversion, and they would have been right.
That same year, Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm, even as his father, Vice President Joe Biden, became the White House’s point man on Kyiv. The entanglement of political power and private gain could not have been more naked. Meanwhile, U.S. democracy promotion programs, funneled through USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, poured billions into Ukraine since independence, cultivating NGOs, media outlets, and political operatives. Nuland herself boasted of “$5 billion” in U.S. assistance since 1991. We can debate whether this was benevolent democracy-building or covert influence, but the effect was the same: Ukraine’s politics shifted decisively westward with Washington’s hand on the scale.
For Russia, the message was clear: this was not an organic revolution. It was regime change dressed in popular protest. And the fallout was bloody. From 2014 onward, eastern Ukraine descended into civil war. The Donbas region declared independence. Kyiv sent in the army. Shelling, rocket fire, and snipers followed. According to UN and OSCE tallies, some 14,000 people were killed between 2014 and 2021. The war had already begun. By the time Russian armor crossed the border in 2022, the Donbas had been a battlefield for eight years. To call February 2022 the “start” of the war is to erase nearly a decade of blood.
This is the context in which books like Provoked emerged—controversial, blunt, accused of parroting Kremlin propaganda. Critics dismiss it as too sympathetic, too eager to blame the West. But what makes Provoked so uncomfortable is not invention but repetition. It lays out what Kennan foresaw, what Burns warned, what Putin said in Munich, and what Nuland revealed on tape. It is not a revelation; it is a reminder. I do not need it as a crutch—I saw enough with my own eyes, and I studied enough of Europe’s political architecture to know the warnings were real—but I will not pretend it does not exist. To ignore it would be dishonest.
The absurdity of the Western narrative is visible in its contradictions. Putin is cast as simultaneously omnipotent and impotent: a weak man dying of stage-six cancer and also Hitler reborn, ready to conquer Europe. He is mocked as Trump’s lapdog and denounced as the master puppeteer behind Trump. Russia is derided as a paper tiger with an economy smaller than Italy’s, yet also painted as an existential threat to global democracy. Which is it? If open-source intelligence has shown us anything in this war, it is that Russia is not the unstoppable juggernaut of Western nightmares. Every trench, every destroyed tank, every drone strike has been documented in real time. Russia has fought with brute attrition, not blitzkrieg. Its ambition is not to roll to the Atlantic, but to hold the line in the Donbas and to stop NATO from planting itself on its border.
I know this because I have seen Russia in its moments of humiliation. I remember flying over the Soviet Union in 1990 on my way to Nepal: fields littered with the carcasses of dead planes, the hollowed-out relics of a military-industrial empire. I spent a week in St. Petersburg in 1996, when the Hermitage was guarded by mafiosi in leather trench coats and Adidas tracksuits, when prostitutes called hotel rooms offering “a good time,” when Nevsky Prospect was the only street that glittered. Everywhere else, scaffolding carried banners reading “Restored with funds from the European Union” or “Funded by the Government of Japan.” Imagine the humiliation of walking past signs proclaiming that your national treasures were being rebuilt by foreign patrons. America would never tolerate such public dependency. Yet Russia did, because it had no choice.
Even in the 2000s, when I lived in Germany, sanctions against Russia were constant, rhetoric hostile, yet Moscow kept the gas flowing. For all the talk of weaponizing energy, Russia rarely turned off the tap—even when insulted, even when punished. The United States, by contrast, was eager to cut off Nord Stream, and when those pipelines exploded in 2022, Western commentators all but cheered, despite the lack of conclusive evidence about who was responsible. The truth is awkward: Russia showed continuity. The West showed sabotage.
Ukraine, meanwhile, became the West’s Dorian Gray. It absorbed the corruption, the dirty work, the secrets. The Biden family entangled itself with Burisma. Tech bros turned Kyiv into a cheap back office for Silicon Valley. Hackers and programmers turned Ukraine into a cyber gray zone. U.S.-linked labs studied pathogens in facilities that would never pass political muster in Maryland or Virginia. The CIA parked black sites there when it needed legal limbo. Ukraine has wheat, minerals, genius programmers, and a kind of entrepreneurial hustle rare in Europe. Which is precisely why Washington needed it. America stayed clean by exporting its rot. Ukraine bore the stains.
This is not to sanctify Russia. Espionage, manipulation, and brutality are constants of its statecraft. Every ex-KGB or GRU officer will tell you—yes, assets remain in Europe, in Washington, in New York. But none of that erases the West’s provocations. For three and a half years I have been harangued for saying this aloud. In the fever of 2022, when every Twitter bio flew the Ukrainian flag, to question the “unprovoked war” narrative was to brand yourself a traitor. I was called a stooge, a bot, a Benedict Arnold. The hysteria has cooled now—Gaza has replaced Kyiv as the avatar of moral urgency—but I will not forget how total the conformity once was.
What unsettles me most is not Russia, but the cycle of manufactured adversaries. Every eighteen months, the United States hands the public a new Emmanuel Goldstein: Putin, Xi, Khamenei, Assad, Gaddafi, Saddam, Noriega, Ortega. The names change, the hysteria remains. We are told to hate, to foam at the mouth, to sanctify the next proxy war. Iran was supposed to be the great threat not long ago. Then it was ISIS. Now it is Putin, endlessly. Tomorrow it may be Netanyahu. The point is not consistency. The point is perpetual outrage.
What has emerged in the meantime is a multipolar world the West pretended could never exist. BRICS, once a Goldman Sachs acronym, is now a bloc with Russia, China, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and more aligning outside the dollar. Western economists sneer at their GDPs, but commodities and energy matter more than spreadsheets. If Saudi Arabia and China trade oil outside the dollar, the global order shifts. The very outcome Washington feared—Moscow and Beijing aligned—has been hastened by Washington’s arrogance.
None of this makes Putin a saint or Russia an innocent. It makes the Western narrative a lie. The war in Ukraine was not unprovoked. It was cultivated, warned against, and made inevitable by decades of provocation. We ignored the warnings of Kennan, Burns, and even Putin himself. We meddled in Kyiv’s politics in 2014. We armed one side of a civil war that killed thousands before 2022. And then we told ourselves a fairy tale about democracy under siege, as if history began the moment Russian tanks crossed a border already soaked in blood.
If the only rebuttal is to call me naive, an appeaser, a stooge, so be it. Call me Chamberlain if you like. But history is what it is. This war was not unprovoked. It was provoked, cultivated, and foreseen. The West lit the fuse in Europe’s most dangerous powder keg, and now the world lives with the fire.
tl;dr
The provided text argues against the widely accepted narrative that Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked. It asserts that Western actions, particularly NATO's eastward expansion and interference in Ukrainian politics, served as long-term provocations. The author cites warnings from figures like George Kennan and William Burns, alongside Vladimir Putin's own statements, highlighting Russia's consistent opposition to these moves. Furthermore, the text suggests that the 2014 Maidan uprising was not a purely spontaneous event but rather was significantly influenced by Washington, leading to a civil war in Donbas that predated the 2022 invasion. Ultimately, the source contends that the conflict was "cultivated, warned against, and made inevitable" by decades of Western policy, emphasizing that the narrative of an "unprovoked war" ignores crucial historical context.
