The Peter Principle ...

In the 20th century, Ukraine experienced two atrocities, the first being Stalin in the 30s and the second, Hitler in the 40s. Now, the country's experiencing war in the 21st, thanks to Putin's strategic blunder but there are underlying reasons as geopolitical gamesmanship never happens without initial causes like the ones seen here, issues explained in detail by Chris Hedges and William Smith.

In 1989 ...

I was in Eastern Europe in 1989, reporting on the revolutions that overthrew the ossified communist dictatorships that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a time of hope. NATO, with the breakup of the Soviet empire, became obsolete. President Mikhail Gorbachev reached out to Washington and Europe to build a new security pact that would include Russia. Secretary of State James Baker, along with West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, assured the Soviet leader that if Germany were unified NATO would not be extended beyond the new borders. The commitment not to expand NATO, also made by Britain and France, appeared to herald a new global order. We saw the peace dividend dangled before us, the promise that the massive expenditures on weapons that had characterized the Cold War would be converted into expenditures on social programs and infrastructures that had long been neglected to feed the insatiable appetite of the military.

There was a near universal understanding among diplomats and political leaders at the time that any attempt to expand NATO was foolish, an unwarranted provocation against Russia that would obliterate the ties and bonds that happily emerged at the end of the Cold War. 

How naive we were. The war industry did not intend to shrink its power or its profits. It set out almost immediately to recruit the former Communist bloc countries into the European Union and NATO. Countries that joined NATO, which now include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia, were forced to reconfigure their militaries, often through hefty loans, to become compatible with NATO military hardware.

There would be no peace dividend. The expansion of NATO swiftly became a multi-billion-dollar bonanza for the corporations that had profited from the Cold War. (Poland, for example, just agreed to spend $6 billion on M1 Abrams tanks and other U.S. military equipment.) If Russia would not acquiesce to again being the enemy, then Russia would be pressured into becoming the enemy. And here we are: On the brink of another Cold War, one from which only the war industry will profit while, as W.H. Auden wrote, the little children die in the streets.

In 2014 ...

Government of Ukraine - ДСТУ 4512:2006 — Державний прапор України. Загальні технічні умови

Russia is massing tanks and troops on the Ukrainian border. Inevitably, we are about to hear many ‘Putin is Hitler’ media stories. What will go unsaid is that the seven-year crisis in the Ukraine was largely an American creation, due to the US’s congenital meddling and interventionism in nations with little strategic importance to the United States. There is great irony in Biden administration officials trying to get ahead of a potential crisis that was largely caused by Biden’s nominee for undersecretary of state for political affairs, Victoria Nuland.

The potential area of conflict is Ukraine’s Donbass region, the eastern-most portion of Ukraine where most people speak Russian as their first language. In early 2014, civil war broke out in the Donbass after a US-backed coup d’état had ousted the Russian-leaning government in Kiev. The coup was clearly orchestrated by Nuland, who was then assistant secretary of state for European affairs; she probably had the CIA’s assistance. Someone, likely the Russians, intercepted and leaked Nuland’s phone call to the then-US ambassador Jeffrey Pyatt. Their discussion was to decide who was to be the next prime minister of Ukraine. Nuland’s choice was Arseniy Yatsenyuk, a rabidly anti-Russian politician. Nuland famously said: ‘I think Yats is the guy.’ When Pyatt warned Nuland that the Europeans might not support Yatsenyuk, Nuland diplomatically replied: ‘Fuck the EU.’ Yats ended up as prime minister.

Neoconservative revisionist historians like to point to Russia’s invasion of Crimea as the origin of the recent Ukrainian crisis. This account of history is, quite frankly, ludicrous. Nuland’s meddling in the internal politics of Russia’s neighbor is the equivalent of Putin orchestrating a coup in Canada to install a pro-Russian prime minister. American diplomats should not be arrogantly choosing the prime ministers of countries in the backyards of other great powers. The US’s blockheaded diplomats instigated the crisis.

 It's all about the money, always has been, always will be along with inept people being in charge of things they never should be in charge of.