On February 24th, Russia invaded Ukraine in what can turn into the deadliest conflict in Europe after World War 2. For the previous eight years, Russia and Ukraine have been at odds; in 2014, Russia seized and established military authority over Ukraine's southern Crimean peninsula. The ensuing conflict – between Ukraine's military and Russian-backed separatists and Russian forces in Ukraine's Donbas regions has never formally ended, with an estimated 14,000 people murdered and 1.5 million people displaced to date.

 After the Soviet Union disintegrated in the early 1990s, Ukraine, a former Soviet nation, possessed the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal. Russia and US worked with  Ukraine to de-nuclearize the country. Kyiv returned hundreds of nuclear warheads to Russia in exchange for security assurances against a possible Russian assault in a round of diplomatic deals. But with Volodymyr  Zelensky's increasing orientation towards the NATO and EU, Putin considered Ukraine an informal member of NATO without a formal decision and regarded it as "untenable to Russia's national security”.

Western political leaders and the media are condemning Putin for the catastrophe, but there is another side to the story as well. Prominent political scientist John Mearsheimer and leaders such as the Iranian supreme leader Ayat Ullah Khamenei and Putin blame the 'meddling' policies of the Western World; Europe, and the USA for the crisis in Ukraine.

The Kremlin has long made it clear to the West that NATO expansion and a westernized Ukraine are incompatible with Russia's key security interests. Despite this, the United States urged Ukraine to join with Europe and refused to rule out membership in NATO's military alliance. The US did so knowing that there was a high risk that Putin would use military force to defend his vision of Russia's interests in Ukraine and that Ukraine would be unable to militarily defeat a Russian invasion without the assistance of a foreign army. Also, what is evident in the current situation is that America would not be willing to sacrifice American lives or risk a nuclear war in defense of Ukrainian sovereignty.

What is happening in Ukraine is ofcourse devastating but unfortunately, for world leaders it is all about great power politics. The United States and the Western hemisphere were not unaware that when you're a country like Ukraine living next door to a superpower like Russia, you have to pay attention to what the Russians believe because if you poke them, they'll react! as John Mearsheimer commented in 2015, "What's going on here is that the West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked."

Russia Ukraine War - The other side of the story

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