“We have heard from Washington at various levels that NATO membership for Ukraine has been ruled out,” Russian spokesman Dmitry Peskov explained. “And of course this is something that brings us satisfaction and coincides with our position that Ukraine should not be a member of NATO and should not have prospects of integration with the North Atlantic Alliance.”
Since 2008, the North Atlantic Alliance has been promising to one day add Ukraine as a member of the bloc. However, Moscow protested Kiev accession to the alliance, arguing that it would present a major national security concern for Russia.
While the American President following Bush did little to make Ukraine a formal member of the bloc, each President ramped up US support for Ukraine. President Joe Biden finally pushed Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine when he began treating Kiev as a de facto member of the military alliance in 2021.
Putin made several diplomatic overtures in late 2021 and early 2022, seeking to get Washington to take NATO membership off the table for Kiev. However, the top officials in the Biden administration pretended not to understand that Ukraine joining the bloc was a major red line for Russia. This was the provocation that ultimately led Putin to order the invasion of Ukraine.
As Scott Horton explains in his book Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, it was a long-established fact in Washington that Kiev becoming a treaty ally with the US was going to lead to Russia lashing out at Ukraine. In fact, the best evidence comes from the CIA Director during the Biden Presidency, William Burns, who in 2008, was serving as an American diplomat in Russia.
Source: AntiWar.com.
