The History Behind Putin’s War in Ukraine
Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine is a horrific, unconscionable act. NATO’s expansionist policy made such an invasion more likely. Both of these things are true.
A member of the Ukrainian military stands amid debris caused after a Russian rocket was shot down by Ukrainian air defenses on March 14, 2022 in Kiev, Ukraine. (Chris McGrath / Getty Images)
In the 1980s and 1990s, Anatol Lieven covered the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the wars in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and the southern Caucasus, for the Financial Times and the Times of London. In the 2000s, he worked at several think tanks in Washington and is now a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He also has seven books to his name, most recently Climate Change and the Nation State.
Earlier this month, Doug Henwood spoke with Lieven about Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine and the post–Cold War expansion of NATO. Henwood edited the interview — originally broadcast on March 3 — to make it read more like prose than spoken word (Henwood’s comments are in square brackets). It appears below.
Some background on the first question. In February 1997, George Kennan, one of the architects of the Cold War policy of containment of the USSR, wrote this in the New York Times:
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