The Russian invasion of Ukraine resulted from two immense
strategic blunders, Robert Service says. The first came on Nov.
10, when the U.S. and Ukraine signed a Charter on Strategic
Partnership, which asserted America�s support for Kyiv�s right
to pursue membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
The pact made it likelier than ever that Ukraine would
eventually join NATO�an intolerable prospect for Vladimir Putin.
�It was the last straw,� Mr. Service says. Preparations
immediately began for Russia�s so-called special military
operation in Ukraine.

Mr. Service, 74, is a veteran historian of Russia, a professor
emeritus at St. Antony�s College, Oxford and a fellow at
Stanford�s Hoover Institution. He has written biographies of
Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky. The last work, published in 2009,
attracted the ire of die-hard Trotskyites world-wide for saying
that their hero shared many basic ideas with Lenin and Stalin on
the �one-party, one ideology terror state.� Mr. Service says
they still �mess around� his Wikipedia entry.

The November agreement added heft to looser assurances Ukraine
received at a NATO summit five months earlier that membership
would be open to the country if it met the alliance�s criteria.
Mr. Service characterizes these moves as �shambolic
mismanagement� by the West, which offered Ukraine encouragement
on the NATO question but gave no apparent thought to how such a
tectonic move away from Moscow would go down with Mr. Putin.
�Nothing was done to prepare the Ukrainians for the kind of
negative response that they would get.�

After all, Mr. Service says, Ukraine is �one of the hot spots in
the mental universe of Vladimir Putin, and you don�t wander into
it without a clear idea of what you�re going to do next.� The
West has known that since at least 2007, when the Russian ruler
made a speech at the Munich Conference on Security Policy that
was, in Mr. Service�s words, �a rage against Ukraine ever
joining NATO.� He was about to step down from the Russian
presidency (to become prime minister for four years), �so it was
his last lion�s roar in the jungle.� When he returned as
president in 2012, he made it clear again that �the Ukraine-NATO
question wasn�t negotiable.�

In July 2021 he wrote an essay that foretold the invasion. Mr.
Service sums it up as saying, �more or less, that Ukrainians and
Russians are one people.� Mr. Putin had said so many times
before, �but not as angrily and punchily�and emotionally.�

It rankles Mr. Putin that Ukraine would seek to join the
West�and not merely because he wants it as a satellite state. He
also �can�t afford to allow life to a neighboring Slav state
which has even a smidgen of democratic development. His Russian
people might get dangerous ideas.�

As a result of the invasion, which began on Feb. 24, �the U.S.
has started to get its act together,� Mr. Service says. �But I
don�t think American diplomacy covered itself in glory in 2021.�

The second strategic error was Mr. Putin�s underestimation of
his rivals. �He despises the West and what he sees as Western
decadence,� Mr. Service says. �He had come to believe that the
West was a shambles, both politically and culturally.� He also
thought that the leaders of the West were �of poor quality, and
inexperienced, in comparison with himself. After all, he�s been
in power 20 years.�

In Mr. Putin�s cocksure reckoning, the invasion was going to be
�a pushover�not just in regard to Ukraine, but in regard to the
West.� He�d spent four years �running rings around Donald Trump,
� and he thought the retirement of German Chancellor Angela
Merkel left the West rudderless. That set the scene for the
�surprise he got when he invaded Ukraine, when he found that
he�d inadvertently united the West�that what he�d done was the
very opposite of what he wanted.� Mr. Service calls Mr. Putin
�reckless and mediocre� and scoffs at the notion that he is
�some sort of genius.� What kind of Russian leader, he asks,
�makes it impossible for a German leader not to build up
Germany�s armaments�?

Mr. Putin evidently �hoped there wouldn�t have to be a war�
because the massing of troops on the border would lead to the
collapse of the Ukrainian government. He underestimated
Volodymyr Zelensky, whom he�d met in Paris in December 2019, six
months after the Ukrainian president took office. Mr. Putin had
�done his usual brutal discussion performance with him. Zelensky
came out of these talks obviously shaken.�

Biden and the whore really fucked this up.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cause-ukraine-war-robert-service-
moscow-putin-lenin-stalin-history-communism-invasion-kgb-fsb-
11646413200