On 27 February 2014, masked gunmen without insignia seized the Supreme Council of Crimea in Simferopol, beginning a pattern of Russian military action that Moscow denied, then admitted, and then repeated on a far larger scale in 2022. The war in Ukraine is not a response to NATO expansion or a defensive operation against the alliance. It is a war against Ukraine’s elected government, its cities, and its civilians.
Crimea and Donbas: The Pattern Begins
Within three weeks of the Simferopol seizure, 20,000 to 25,000 Russian troops had deployed to the peninsula or massed on its borders. Naval infantry and Spetsnaz units were among them. Vladimir Putin denied this for a month. Then, on 17 April 2014, he admitted that Russian forces had stood behind Crimea’s self-defense militias.
In Donbas, Russian regulars fought at Ilovaisk in August 2014. Ukrainian troops were trapped there and hundreds were killed. More fighting followed at Debaltseve in January and February 2015. Russia still lists those battles as rebel victories.
The 2022 Invasion Was Not Defensive
In late 2021, Moscow issued an ultimatum. It demanded NATO withdraw from Eastern Europe and legally bar Ukraine from membership. Then it massed over 150,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders. Satellite imagery from February 2022 showed field hospitals and bridging equipment. Combat units were staged for an invasion, not a response to provocation.
Ukraine’s military posture in the preceding weeks was defensive. Forces remained dispersed near cities, and Kyiv repeatedly sought talks. The full-scale assault began on February 24, 2022. Missile strikes hit Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa within the first hour. No Ukrainian offensive preceded that.
The NATO Expansion Myth
No binding treaty ever promised Moscow that NATO would not expand eastward. The 1990 Two Plus Four Treaty settled German reunification. It allowed a united Germany to remain in NATO. But it placed no limits on other states.
At the 1994 Budapest summit, Bill Clinton explicitly rejected Boris Yeltsin’s demand for a “gentlemen’s agreement” barring former Warsaw Pact countries from joining. The 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act created a permanent joint council. It pledged no nuclear weapons in new member states. Yet it expressly permitted enlargement.
- Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined in 1999.
- The Baltic states followed in 2004.
- Every step took place through open invitation, not coercion.
The “Neo-Nazi Junta” Claim
In 2019 Ukrainians elected Volodymyr Zelensky, a Jewish president whose family lost relatives in the Holocaust, with 73 percent of the vote. The far-right Svoboda party polled 2.15 percent in that year’s parliamentary election and won a single seat; Right Sector has never cleared the 5 percent threshold. In the 2022 parliamentary by-elections, no far-right candidate came close to winning.
Russia’s “neo-Nazi junta” claim rests on the Azov Regiment, founded in 2014 in Mariupol as a volunteer militia and later integrated into the National Guard, where its command was replaced by officers appointed from Kyiv. By 2022 Azov’s far-right origins had been largely diluted by conscription and professionalization, and the unit’s defenders held out for 80 days in the Azovstal steel plant against a Russian siege. Ukraine’s 2022 law banning antisemitic hate speech passed.
Russia Is Not Fighting NATO
Moscow keeps saying its army is fighting NATO. Its own casualty figures say otherwise. In March 2025, Russia’s Defense Ministry reported 42,000 Ukrainian strikes on Belgorod, Kursk, and Bryansk oblasts since February 2022. Civilians killed in those regions alone: 652. NATO has not deployed combat troops to Ukraine. What the alliance does have there is trainers and logistics personnel in Poland, Romania, and Germany.
The war’s targets are Ukrainian apartment blocks, power plants, and schools. Not alliance columns.
Meanwhile, Russian missiles hit a maternity hospital in Vilniansk on November 23, 2022, killing a newborn. On January 14, 2023, they hit a residential block in Dnipro, killing 46 people. Six of them were children. No NATO soldier was in either building. On Ukrainian soil, Russia has not fought a single engagement with a NATO unit.