The death, destruction, and displacement resulting from Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine are gruesome enough to evoke a question that deserves to be asked: Could this have been avoided?
The navel-gazing, second-guessing, and blame peddling of recent weeks have centered on the late 1990s expansion of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact states, and the alliance’s 2008 Bucharest “open door” declaration acknowledging Georgia and Ukraine’s aspirations to join it in the future. Vladimir Putin’s response? By late summer 2008, Russia had occupied disputed territories with Georgia, and in 2014 it infiltrated and seized Crimea from Ukraine. Now he has taken Ukraine’s ethnic Russian-populated Donbas region and a land bridge to Crimea along the Black Sea.
