How and when? Too long for a comment to do it justice, so just the bullet points:
- It started in 1997 with the first NATO expansion.
- 2004 US overturned an election in Ukraine. The US candidate still didn't win. US expanded meddling (against the UN charter, by the way) in Ukraine politics. This also broke the Budapest Memorandum (1992 or 1994 IIRC).
- Really got rolling in 2008, when Bush said he wanted Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO. Russia and the then US ambassador to Russia (now CIA director) said that Ukraine was a "red line" for Russia.
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW265_a.html
(1)
- 2008 US goaded Georgia to start a war with Russia. It lasted five days. Note that many western press still incorrectly state that Russia started the war. It wasn't. Similar to what is now happening in Ukraine, the US convinced Georgia that we'd back them up if they went to war with Russia.
- 2014 after 10 years, Ukraine still was not electing the "right" leaders. When Yanukovych got a better deal from Russia than from the EU, he was coup-ed with the personal help of Victoria Nuland and armed NAZIs in Ukraine.
- (1) see that link above? Read that and see how prescient William Burns was. Civil war ensued in Ukraine.
Russia did not start that civil war. The US did by coup-ing the democratically elected gov't of Ukraine and replacing it with our handpicked people.
- 2014-2022 The US ran Ukraine as a vassal and "NATO except officially" partner. We poured over $3 billion in weapons into the country getting them ready for war with Russia. Merkel, Hollande, and Poroshenko all stated publicly that they never intended to implement the peace plan they signed, just to use it to buy time for this war.
So, Russia is certainly not blameless, but as usual the main culprit is the US MIC and energy companies that control our government and demands ever expanding markets. We have hated the Russian delivery of gas to Europe since Kennedy in 1962 when he applied sanctions not unlike what we did in the 2010s against gas pipelines to Europe.
Those sanctions worked as well in 1962 as now, which is to say, they did more damage to US-Europe relations than they did to the USSR (now Russia).
Good thing I only had time for bullet points! LOL (laughing at myself here).
