Fiona Hill

Ireland, Cyprus, there's all kinds of, you know, instances where we look at this thing.

What Russia is doing now, Putin is trying to occupy another country, irrespective of, you know, kind of the historical linkages and, you know, the kind of the larger metanarratives that he's trying to put forward there.

Look, I think the whole situation here is very complicated and you have to take a much longer view than what happened in 2008 with the open door for Ukraine and Georgia, which actually, by the way, I thought was a strategic blunder, just to be very clear, because it wasn't any kind of thinking through about what the implications of that would be and what it actually would mean for Ukraine's security.

And also bearing in mind what Putin had already said about NATO expansion,

They came on the wake of the recognition by the United States pretty unilaterally of Kosovo.

And it also comes in the wake of what I mentioned before, the invasion of Iraq, which really is very significant.

important for understanding Putin's psyche.

So I think we have to go back much further than it's not just talking about kind of NATO and what that means.

NATO is part of the whole package of Ukraine going in a different direction from Russia, just as so is the European Union.

Remember, the annexation of Crimea comes after

Ukraine has sought an association agreement with the European Union, not with NATO at that particular point.

Even though, you know, the EU on the security, common security and defense policy basically has all kinds of connections with NATO, you know, various different levels in European security front.

It was all about Europe and going on a different economic and political and ultimately legal path.

Because if you have...

an association agreement, eventually you get into the acquis communautaire, and it just transforms the country completely, and Ukraine is no longer the Ukraine of the Soviet period or the Russian Empire period.

It becomes, you know, on a different trajectory like Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, you know, another country.

It becomes a different place.

It moves into a different space, and that's part of it.

But if you go back again...

to the period at the very beginning of the 1990s, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, where there's no discussion about NATO at that point and NATO enlargement, there was a lot of pressure, again, as I've said before, by nationalist elements on Ukraine trying to bring it back in the fold and wanting to make what was then, you know, this mechanism for divorce more of a mechanism for remanagement of the Commonwealth of Independent States.