Scott Horton’s 900-page masterpiece, Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, is a hugely important work that meticulously documents how three decades of Western encirclement provoked Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This long review aims to provide a broad and comprehensive overview of the many crimes, miscalculations, and failures by all sides that led to an unnecessary war.

Scott Horton, founder and director of the Libertarian Institute, is best known for conducting over 6,000 in-depth interviews with experts on U.S. foreign policy. His impressive new book Provoked is a monumental indictment of Western foreign policy follies, tracing how NATO expansion and regime-change wars fueled Russia’s hostility. With thousands of citations, Horton’s research persuasively shows that Western actions—cloaked in rhetoric of democracy and humanitarianism—provoked Moscow’s response.

From NATO’s broken promises to the arming of extremists, Horton exposes a pattern of Western hypocrisy, painting Russia as an expansionist aggressor while sabotaging peace talks in Ukraine. The book is not a defense of Putin’s regime but a forensic audit of how Western overreach and ideological hubris transformed post-Cold War optimism into nuclear standoff. With the precision of a historian and the tenacity of an investigative journalist, Horton challenges the mainstream portrayal of Russia as the sole architect of global instability, arguing instead that U.S. and NATO policies exacerbated conflicts from Chechnya to the Donbas.

By weaving diplomatic cables, declassified documents, battlefield testimonies, and historical analysis into a gripping narrative that is as engrossing as it is unsettling, Horton encourages readers to challenge the myths that threaten to destroy us. Every pivotal claim is substantiated with quotes and data from unimpeachable sources, even establishment figures and outlets. Horton’s reliance on mainstream-respected voices, paired with granular archival research, grants the book a rare authority, transforming what might read as contrarian revisionism into an irrefutable counter-narrative. Horton’s sharp analysis and dark humor make Provoked compelling. This is not a polemic but a forensic use of the West’s own records to expose its missteps.

NATO Expansion: The Seeds of Russian Distrust

Scott Horton convincingly shows that Russia’s deep-seated distrust of the West was the product of a series of deliberate Western policy decisions, chief among them NATO’s relentless eastward expansion. As the Cold War drew to a close, U.S. and European leaders assured Soviet officials that NATO would not advance “one inch eastward” if Moscow allowed German reunification to proceed. These commitments were not vague diplomatic niceties but explicit assurances delivered by top Western officials, including U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Horton meticulously combs through declassified documents and firsthand accounts to demonstrate that these were not casual remarks but carefully worded promises meant to reassure a collapsing Soviet Union.

Horton forcefully argues that the betrayal of these assurances was not only a diplomatic blunder but a profound strategic miscalculation that fueled Russian paranoia. Unlike the cartoonish portrayal of Russian leaders as inherently hostile to Western integration, Horton highlights the fact that Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and even Vladimir Putin were, at various points, open to Russia itself becoming a part of NATO or at least forging a common security architecture that would include both Russia and Europe. They insisted that Russia be treated as an equal partner. All these proposals were systematically ignored or dismissed by Washington, which instead pursued an aggressive expansionist agenda that fundamentally altered the European security landscape.

Horton details how NATO expansion was carried out in distinct waves, each reinforcing Moscow’s belief that the West was treating Russia as a defeated adversary rather than a partner. The first wave came in 1999, when Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic formally joined NATO—a move that George Kennan, the architect of Cold War containment, denounced as a “strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions.” At that time Kennan was “considered to be the wisest and highest-ranking of the retired foreign policy graybeards” in Washington. He predicted that NATO expansion would result in “a new Cold War, probably ending in a hot one, and the end of the effort to achieve a working democracy in Russia.” His words sound like prophecy: “Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are.”

Horton cites dozens of renowned foreign policy luminaries, Russia experts, and diplomats who warned in stark, unequivocal terms that NATO’s eastward expansion would inflame Russian fears, destabilize Europe, weaken Russia’s liberal opposition and pave the war for catastrophic confrontations. He shows that President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Perry almost resigned over the decision. In 2016, Perry told the Guardian, “I have to say that the United States deserves much of the blame. Our first action that really set us off in a bad direction was when NATO started to expand.”

The second wave, in 2004, was even more provocative, bringing in the Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—as well as Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovenia. For the first time, NATO forces were now directly bordering Russia. By 2009, the alliance had absorbed Albania and Croatia, further eroding trust between Moscow and the West. The 2017 addition of Montenegro and 2020 accession of North Macedonia continued this pattern.

Each successive wave of NATO expansion hardened Moscow’s resolve, but the 2008 Bucharest Summit declaration of eventual membership for Ukraine and Georgia escalated the confrontation to an existential level. Horton cites a pivotal April 2008 cable from U.S. Ambassador to Russia William Burns to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, in which Burns cautioned, “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from hardliners to pro-Western liberals, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” Horton contends that Western leaders either willfully ignored these warnings or underestimated their gravity, prioritizing NATO’s post-Cold War expansionist dogma over stability.

Rather than seeking a balanced security architecture, U.S. officials framed each new expansion as an organic, democratic choice made by sovereign states. Horton effectively dismantles this narrative, showing that NATO’s growth was an ideological project driven by a Washington elite intoxicated by its self-proclaimed “unipolar moment.” The belief that Russia could be sidelined fueled an arrogance that ignored the basic principles of realpolitik. Rather than integrating Russia into a cooperative security framework, Western leaders treated NATO as an exclusive club that dictated terms to Moscow instead of negotiating with it. Horton shows that this dismissive approach alienated Russia and strengthened nationalist factions within the country.

Moscow’s initial reaction to NATO expansion was relatively restrained, not because it accepted the new status quo but because, in the 1990s, it lacked the means to resist. Yeltsin, desperate for Western economic assistance, was in no position to challenge Washington’s decisions, though he warned that NATO’s push into Eastern Europe was a betrayal of trust. But as Russia regained its footing under Putin, the grievances accumulated over decades hardened into a doctrine of resistance. Horton convincingly argues that by ignoring Russia’s repeated diplomatic overtures and clear warnings, the West systematically engineered the very hostility it later claimed to be containing.

Horton underscores that Ukraine’s potential NATO membership represents an existential red line for Russia, rooted in a traumatic history of invasions across its western frontier—a vast, open plain devoid of natural barriers like mountains or major rivers. He notes that this region, encompassing modern-day Ukraine and Belarus, has served as an invasion corridor for three catastrophic campaigns: Napoleon’s 1812 march on Moscow, Imperial Germany’s 1914–1917 advance into Russia during World War I, and Hitler’s 1941 Operation Barbarossa, which triggered the deadliest conflict in human history. The Nazi invasion killed an estimated 27 million Soviet citizens, while the Siege of Leningrad—now St. Petersburg—where Putin’s own brother, Viktor, perished during the famine, claimed over one million lives. For Moscow, Horton explains, NATO’s eastward creep into Ukraine resurrects these visceral traumas, compounded by the prominence of Ukrainian neo-Nazi battalions, which openly invoke Third Reich iconography. Putin’s personal loss, alongside Russia’s collective memory of Nazi atrocities, frames Kiev’s alignment with the West as an existential betrayal—a staging ground for hostile forces to repeat history.

Horton shows that NATO turned Ukraine into a de-facto member by increasing the interoperability of its weapons systems and coordinating its war strategies and tactics. By stationing military advisors, intelligence operatives, and weapons in a region historically synonymous with existential invasions, NATO unwittingly fused twenty-first century geopolitical maneuvering with Russia’s centuries-old survival instincts, transforming diplomatic disputes into an irreconcilable confrontation.

Horton incisively critiques a defining pathology of U.S. foreign policy: the inability of American leaders to empathize with adversarial perspectives and to grasp how Washington’s actions are perceived not as benevolent leadership but as existential threats by rivals. He reminds us that the Monroe Doctrine threatens any country in the Americas with war, if it allies itself with a hostile great power. The United States has often enforced this doctrine. Horton adds, “And forget the Monroe Doctrine’s limitations about the Americas. Every nation must bow down to the empire in the Old World too.” He examines compelling evidence implicating American or Ukrainian involvement in the 2022 Nord Stream pipeline sabotage; “Regardless of whether Biden or Zelensky’s forces did it, it was an attack on our ally Germany.”

Western Meddling, Shock Therapy, and Color Revolutions

Scott Horton details how the West’s enthusiastic and massive support for Boris Yeltsin’s corrupt and authoritarian gangster state, combined with the brutal shock therapy imposed by the International Monetary Fund, led to total economic devastation and the rise of oligarchic rule in Russia. He reveals that Western governments continued to back the Yeltsin regime even after his violent 1993 suppression of Russia’s parliament—a military assault that saw tanks shell the legislature, killing at least 187 people—prioritizing geopolitical stability and radical market reforms. The rapid privatization, extreme austerity measures, and epic corruption triggered an economic collapse of historic proportions, with plummeting life expectancy. Horton quotes a study by a renown expert, which “estimated 3.4 million premature Russian deaths between 1990 and 1998.” This blatant interference in Russian politics fostered deep resentment and distrust of the West among the Russian public, discrediting liberal reformers. Out of this chaos Putin emerged as a strong leader who was perceived as restoring security, unity, and prosperity. Despite his current reputation in the West, Putin initially made significant efforts to maintain good relations with Western powers.

The West’s “democracy promotion” machinery blatantly violated the sovereignty of many countries in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Horton dissects the U.S.-funded “color revolutions” in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and other countries, portrayed as grassroots uprisings but often orchestrated by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), among other organizations funded by Western governments and the Soros Foundation. He convincingly shows that Western support for the political opposition and pro-Western media outlets was of crucial importance in most of these revolutions.

These often violent movements replaced authoritarian regimes with Western-friendly counterparts that were equally repressive. Georgia’s Mikheil Saakashvili, hailed as a reformer after the Rose Revolution of 2003, jailed opponents and tortured prisoners. The Orange Revolution of 2004 in Ukraine brought a pro-Western nationalist government to power that was equally mired in graft as the old one—its leaders Yushchenko and Tymoshenko quickly turned on each other in bitter power struggles. In Kyrgyzstan, the Tulip Revolution of 2005 ousted one corrupt, authoritarian leader only to install another who granted the U.S. expanded military access.

Horton documents the West’s steadfast support for authoritarian rulers like Nazarbayev’s brutal reign in Kazakhstan, the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan, which massacred hundreds of pro-democracy protesters in Andijan in 2005, and Azerbaijan’s Aliyev dynasty, a kleptocracy that silences dissent and pursues ethnic expulsion in Nagorno-Karabakh, all while supplying NATO with oil. Russian leaders, Horton notes, seized on the glaring hypocrisy of the West’s rhetoric of democracy promotion.

Proxy Wars and Escalating Grievances

Horton argues that Washington’s disregard for international law—exemplified by NATO’s unauthorized bombing of Yugoslavia (1999), the invasion of Iraq (2003), and regime-change campaigns in Libya (2011) and Syria (2012)—convinced Russian elites that the “rules-based order” was a hollow slogan. Moscow watched as the West framed these wars as moral imperatives while ignoring their catastrophic humanitarian consequences and bypassing Unitd Nations mandates. To the Kremlin, these actions were not exceptions but a pattern: aggressive, self-justifying power plays that sidelined Russia’s security concerns and trampled the sovereignty of weaker states. This perception of Western hypocrisy, Horton shows, hardened Russia’s resolve to resist what it saw as existential threats on its borders.

Nowhere is this dynamic clearer than in the Yugoslav Wars, where the Western rhetoric of humanitarianism collided with the brutal realities of proxy warfare. Horton meticulously documents how the United States and Europe, while publicly condemning ethnic cleansing, actively enabled campaigns of violence that suited their geopolitical aims, and sabotaged peace negotiations that could have brought an early end to the fighting. During Croatia’s 1995 Operation Storm—a military offensive that expelled over 200,000 Serbs from the Krajina region, shelling civilian convoys and homes—the Clinton administration provided Zagreb with satellite intelligence and military training, framing the operation as a “liberation” despite its clear echoes of fascist-era ethnic purges. In Bosnia, Western powers armed and legitimized the Bosnian Muslim government even as it allied with jihadist fighters and massacred Serb civilians.

The 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia, ostensibly to halt ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, further exposed this moral bankruptcy. Horton reveals how the West destroyed civilian infrastructure and armed the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a group implicated in drug trafficking, organ harvesting, and the expulsion of 200,000 Serbs and Roma from Kosovo. For Moscow, these interventions were not about saving lives but expanding Western power and humiliating Serbia, Russia’s Balkan ally.

This pattern of provocation extended to the Caucasus and Middle East, where American support for anti-Russian militants deepened Moscow’s sense of encirclement. Horton argues that during the Second Chechen War Washington tacitly encouraged allies like Saudi Arabia and Turkey to arm and fund jihadist-linked Chechen rebels. This proxy strategy aimed to destabilize post-Soviet Russia and block its control of Caspian oil pipelines. Gulf states funneled weapons and Wahhabi ideology through charities, while U.S. officials allegedly approved training programs in Azerbaijan for militants. Horton views Putin’s scorched-earth retaliation as a desperate, though criminal reaction to foreign-backed terrorism. While some American involvement is well-documented, claims of direct CIA arms transfers remain plausible but unproven.

Horton argues that the 2008 Georgia War was a direct consequence of NATO’s reckless posturing. At the Bucharest Summit that April, the alliance pledged eventual membership to Georgia and Ukraine. Emboldened by this guarantee—and years of U.S. military aid and training—Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili launched an artillery assault on Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia, shelling its capital Tskhinvali. Horton argues that Moscow’s swift retaliation was sending a message: NATO expansion would not go unchallenged.

Horton argues that the United States and its allies Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar prolonged Syria’s civil war by arming extremist rebels, including al-Qaeda-linked factions like Jabhat al-Nusra. This attempt to topple the Bashar al-Assad regime fueled the rise of ISIS and al-Qaeda, pushing Syria toward collapse by 2015. Russia’s intervention, condemned as aggression, is framed as pragmatic: halting jihadist spillover into the North Caucasus and safeguarding its Middle Eastern ally.

For Horton, these conflicts are interconnected; each Western-backed insurgency, regime-change operation or illegal war deepened Russian fears, justifying ever-more authoritarian and militarized responses.

Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution and Far-Right Ascendancy

The book’s most explosive chapters dissect Ukraine’s 2014 Euromaidan uprising. Horton rejects the Western narrative, revealing how far-right groups like Right Sector and C14 spearheaded the violent overthrow of the democratically elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych, sidelining the peaceful protests. He discusses in-depth research, which strongly suggests that the far right groups killed at least as many people as the security forces. These antisemitic, racist, and homophobic factions were integrated into Ukraine’s post-Maidan security apparatus. Azov fighters openly displayed neo-Nazi insignia, while the state glorified the fascist leader and Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera.

Horton details how Western governments and George Soros funneled substantial resources into pro-Western NGOs and media in Ukraine for years before the Maidan. This long-term investment cultivated a political infrastructure primed for regime change. Horton highlights the 2014 leaked phone call between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt—a candid discussion about handpicking Ukraine’s post-Maidan leadership, notably Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who was later appointed prime minister. Post-coup, Western powers bolstered the new government with military aid and training, intelligence sharing, and diplomatic cover. In 2024, The New York Times revealed that the CIA established twelve secret bases near Ukraine’s border with Russia following the 2014 coup. Yet Western governments conspicuously avoided pressuring Kiev to compromise with disenfranchised Russian-speaking populations in the east and south. They also stayed silent on hard right members of the government, the army leadership and the police. Horton proves that the United States and Canada even trained and armed neo-nazi fighters from Azov and other regiments. Azov leader Andrij Biletsky wants Ukraine “to lead the white peoples of the whole world on the last crusade for their existence. A campaign against Semitic-led Untermenschen.”

Public opinion, Horton shows, was deeply fractured. Polls revealed stark regional divides: western Ukraine supported European Union integration and the Maidan revolution, while the Russian-speaking east and south feared cultural erasure. Post-coup policies—banning Russian language in schools, purging pro-Yanukovich officials, and celebrating fascist leaders—alienated millions, fueling the Donbas rebellion.

Kiev’s response was brutal. Militias like Azov indiscriminately shelled civilian areas in Donbas, raped, looted, and kidnapped people. The army used airstrikes, heavy artillery, and cluster bombs while security forces executed and tortured suspected separatists, documented by UN reports and human rights organizations. Kiev also cut off water and food supplies to rebel areas. A report from the United Nations concluded that “the vast majority of civilian casualties in the Donbas war between 2018 and 2021, approximately 81.4 percent, occurred in rebel-held areas, while 16.3 percent were in Ukrainian government-controlled territory.”

Horton does not absolve Russia’s exploitation of the conflict but stresses that Kiev’s hardline approach, encouraged by Western advisors, turned political dissent into open war. He shows that the vast majority of the rebels in the east were Ukrainians, who feared repression by the new government. The civil war gradually turned into a proxy war between the West and Russia. But before Russia’s 2022 invasion “the Donbas rebels were almost entirely local fighters.”

Horton’s analysis highlights Ukraine’s troubling drift toward authoritarianism and illiberalism, despite the West’s portrayal of the 2014 revolution as a democratic breakthrough. He documents the systematic suppression of political opposition, including banning parties, censoring dissenting media, and even resorting to assassination campaigns and religious discrimination. Rather than dismantling oligarchic power, post-Maidan reforms entrenched it, with corruption persisting at all levels despite billions in Western aid. Volodymyr Zelensky administration’s consolidated authority before and after Russia’s invasion in the form of cancelling elections, arresting critics, and centralizing control, all of which further reveals a trajectory toward autocracy, exacerbated by wartime measures. Horton also exposes the government’s use of press gangs to brutally force ever younger men into the army.

Crucially, he links Ukraine’s democratic decline to Western complicity. By prioritizing geopolitical aims over democratic accountability, American and European Union leaders turned a blind eye to Kiev’s repression. The West, Horton argues, failed even to strengthen Ukraine’s central government against persistent threats from the radical right. To make things worse, they did push harsh IMF austerity measures on the country.

Famine, Fascism, and Foreign Manipulation

To contextualize Ukraine’s divisions, Horton revisits its traumatic past. Joseph Stalin’s forced collectivization in the 1930s triggered a man-made famine that killed millions, deepening distrust of Moscow. During World War II, factions of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), including those aligned with Bandera, collaborated with the Nazis and actively participated in the genocide of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles.

After the war, the United States covertly backed OUN remnants in their guerrilla campaign against Soviet rule, whitewashing their fascist past to frame them as anti-communist “freedom fighters.” The world wars and the Cold War, Horton argues, laid the groundwork for modern Ukraine’s ideological schism: a west that venerates Bandera and an east that views him as a symbol of fascist terror. Today, Horton notes, Bandera is celebrated as a national hero in western Ukraine, his legacy enshrined in state-sponsored memorials and military symbolism. The Ukrainian journalist Lev Golinkin has documented “several hundred monuments, statues and streets named after Nazi collaborators in Ukraine” after 2014. Bandera’s birthday is a national holiday.

This historical reckoning is central to Horton’s analysis: the West’s Cold War-era alliance with fascists and Nazi-collaborators and its post-Maidan embrace of far-right groups have resurrected old divisions, alienating Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the east and south who view Bandera’s heirs as fascist successors. The red-and-black flags of the OUN, which flew beside the Ukrainian flags on the Maidan, along with the swastika tattoos on the arms of many Ukrainian soldiers, strike fear into the hearts of minority groups.

The Big Russiagate Hoax

Horton examines the Russiagate saga as a mix of political opportunism and institutional overreach—without an ounce of sympathy for Donald Trump. Horton argues that the narrative of collusion between Trump and Russia, aggressively promoted by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and amplified by factions within U.S. intelligence agencies, was a calculated effort to weaponize public distrust. Despite years of investigations, no credible evidence emerged to prove Trump conspired with Moscow, nor did inquiries validate claims of significant Russian interference in American or European elections. The fallout, Horton contends, was a moral panic, with skeptics of collusion or the Ukraine war smeared as “Putin puppets,” while social media censored debate as “misinformation.” Bipartisan elites revived a McCarthyite suspicion of diplomacy, equating NATO skepticism with Moscow loyalty.

Ironically, Trump appointed Russia hawks and expanded lethal aid to Ukraine beyond Obama-era levels—moves Horton sees as attempts to deflect accusations of Kremlin ties. The episode reveals less about Russian meddling than about the West’s susceptibility to self-inflicted paranoia, where ideological certitude eclipses sober inquiry and unproven threats justify real-world escalations. Despite his disdain for Trump’s demagoguery, Horton condemns liberal elites for abandoning due process, deepening polarization, eroding democracy, and militarizing policy.

Sabotaged Peace, Escalated War

The 2014 and 2015 Minsk Accords, designed to grant autonomy to the Donbas and end the fighting, were systematically undermined by both Kiev’s refusal to implement them and by Western powers treating them as a stalling tactic. The Minsk II agreement of 2015 was mediated by Germany and France as part of the Normandy Format and the OSCE’s Trilateral Contact Group, and formally signed by Ukraine, Russia, and representatives of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. Horton shows that it “essentially demanded the Ukrainian constitution be rewritten to establish stronger federalism for the region and protections for the Russian language.” Kiev refused to implement the necessary political reforms.

Zelensky was elected as a peace maker with a mandate to implement the Minsk Accords. But, as Horton shows, he came under intense pressure from neo-nazi militants and ultranationalists to continue the brutal military campaign. Western powers—despite publicly endorsing Minsk—privately urged Ukraine to “hold out for total victory.” Poroshenko, Merkel, and Hollande later admitted Minsk II was a ruse to buy Ukraine time to rearm, a revelation Moscow seized on as proof of Western bad faith. Ukrainian officials have stated that adherence to Minsk could have averted war, but American and British pressure prioritized weakening Russia.

Horton discusses the lead up to Russia’s invasion in great detail:

“In 2021, the Rada passed legislation that codified Ukraine’s doctrine for the reoccupation and reconstruction of the Donbas…As Zelensky’s old friend Sergei Sivokho complained, it treated eastern populations as ‘conquered people.’ The bill made Ukrainian the only language allowed in official documents or proceedings, permanently barred all state enemies from government employment and ruled out any special status for the Donbas or Crimea.”

Horton details how Putin’s December 2021 draft treaties were dismissed by the United States and NATO as “nonstarters,” despite being framed by experts as a negotiable opening bid. Russia demanded legally binding guarantees against NATO expansion into Ukraine, limits on military deployments in Eastern Europe, and a revival of INF-style missile restrictions. The Joe Biden administration rejected formal agreements, offering only vague “informal assurances” while reaffirming NATO’s “open door” to Ukraine, a stance Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov condemned as ignoring Russia’s core security concerns—even as Biden’s team privately admitted Ukraine’s NATO membership would guarantee war. The OSCE documented a significant escalation in Donetsk in February 2022, recording over 3,400 shell and mortar detonations—with two-thirds to three-quarters targeting rebel-held territory.

Horton acknowledges alternatives Russia should have pursued such as a global diplomatic initiative, multilateral forums, and sending unarmed peacekeepers, though he contextualizes the invasion as a reaction to perceived existential threats rather than imperial ambition. Putin called it a “preemptive attack” against Western aggression. The hawkish NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg later admitted that Putin “went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.”

Horton highlights a pivotal U.S. policy shift right after Russia’s invasion—which even the New York Times admitted to—from defending Ukraine to deliberately prolonging the war to inflict “strategic attrition” on Russia. That’s why the United States completely abandoned diplomacy.

The April 2022 Istanbul peace talks, Horton argues, represent one of the greatest missed opportunities to avert catastrophe. As Russian forces advanced on Kiev in the early weeks of the invasion, Ukrainian and Russian negotiators tentatively agreed to a settlement: Ukraine would adopt neutrality, abandon NATO aspirations, and grant autonomy to Donbas in exchange for security guarantees and Russian withdrawal.

Even Ukrainian diplomats later admitted the deal was nearly complete, with Moscow prepared to compromise on key demands. Then-Zelensky adviser Alexey Arestovich later called the Istanbul negotiations, in which he participated, “completely successful.” He said that “it was the most profitable agreement we could have done…We opened the champagne bottle. We had discussed demilitarization, denazification, issues concerning the Russian language, Russian church and much else.” Ukrainian negotiator Oleksandr Chalyi said, “We were very close in the end of April to finalize our war with some peaceful settlement.”

But Western powers, Horton reveals, actively sabotaged the talks. Then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson reportedly urged Kiev to “fight on,” pledging unlimited military support. He made unmistakenly clear that if Ukraine made peace with Russia, they could not count on American and British support. U.S. officials dismissed diplomacy as appeasement. The talks collapsed, sealing Ukraine’s fate in a prolonged war.

For Horton, this episode epitomizes the tragedy. Peace was possible, but the West prioritized punishing Russia over saving Ukraine. The moment was lost, and the war spiraled into a catastrophic stalemate. The United States and Britain would sacrifice a generation of Ukrainians on the altar of great power politics.

A Senseless War

Provoked recounts the horrific realities of a senseless war, “an absolutely brutal fight, resembling World War I-style trench warfare in the oftentimes freezing mud.” Soldiers on both sides call it a “meat grinder.” Horton illustrates how the Western press tends to exaggerate Russian atrocities while downplaying Ukrainian crimes. Yet, he ultimately concludes: “On balance, the Russians are the aggressors and have attacked towns and cities where innocents are certain to be killed, and so it stands to reason, all war propaganda aside, that they have been guilty of more and worse crimes.”

Horton shows that NATO nations dismissed several more diplomatic off-ramps. Their tough sanctions regime crippled Europe’s economy and triggered Global South food crises, even as Russia pivoted to Asian markets and wartime fiscal resilience. Ukraine’s economy was destroyed by the war.

The Discord leaks exposed that internal U.S. assessments warned of Ukraine’s crippling ammunition shortages and Russia’s impregnable defenses, yet in 2023 Washington pressured Kiev into a counteroffensive it deemed unwinnable. When the assault faltered against Moscow’s trenches and minefields, officials blamed Ukrainian troops for being “casualty averse,” a charge Horton rebukes as grotesque:

“Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, just for President Biden and the empire’s blatantly idiotic and failed scheme.”

A September 2024 poll found that over two-thirds of Ukrainians favor initiating peace talks with Russia—a stark contrast to Western leaders’ rhetoric of “fighting for democracy” while dismissing majority opinion in Ukraine itself.

Nuclear Brinkmanship

Horton’s critique of Washington’s abandonment of Cold War-era arms control treaties with Russia is a chilling example of how short-sighted policy choices escalated nuclear brinkmanship to levels unseen since the Cuban Missile Crisis. He traces the U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019, and the Open Skies Treaty in 2020—cornerstones of strategic stability that had constrained first-strike capabilities.

By deploying missile defense systems in Poland and Romania, ostensibly to counter “Iranian threats,” Horton argues the United States effectively positioned dual-use launchers capable of firing nuclear-tipped missiles at Russia’s heartland, slashing Moscow’s decision-making window in a crisis to a few minutes. Combined with NATO’s military exercises simulating strikes on Russian soil, this convinced the Kremlin that the West wasn’t pursuing deterrence but a first-strike advantage. In his December 2022 address Putin said, “The United States is developing a system for a disarming strike against us…They are creating the capability to neutralize our nuclear response potential, which would allow them to dictate terms or even destroy our state.”

Horton quotes Russian military strategists and U.S. arms control veterans who warned that these moves erased the buffer of time and trust needed to distinguish between a real decapitation attack and a false alarm—a perilous regression to twentieth century doomsday logic. In Horton’s telling, the West’s treaty violations were reinforcing Putin’s siege mentality and justifying Russia’s own nuclear posturing, a feedback loop where “defensive” measures became existential threats. This standoff is sheer insanity, as both Russia and the United States possess thousands of hydrogen bombs—far more powerful than conventional nuclear weapons—capable of killing billions and making large parts of the planet uninhabitable for decades.

Putin’s greatest fear was that NATO might deploy nuclear-capable missile systems in Ukraine, which could one day be controlled by a fiercely anti-Russian nationalist government. In such a scenario, Moscow would face the nightmarish prospect of a sudden, devastating strike—one that could leave the Russian leadership with mere moments to decide whether to launch a nuclear counterattack or gamble on the possibility of a false alarm. This fear was further exacerbated when Western nations signaled their approval for Ukraine to strike targets inside Russia using their supplied weaponry. The West did not even attempt to prevent Ukraine from using Russian neo-nazi groups to conduct raids on Russian territory with Western-supplied weapons.

Hypocrisy, Hubris, and the Human Cost

Provoked serves as a plea for humility, recognizing that both liberal and authoritarian empires breed resentment and perpetuate cycles of violence. It reminds us that the stakes of this confrontation are not abstract ideologies but human lives. Ordinary Ukrainians are cannonfodder, pawns in a bloody game of great power chess.

The book culminates in a damning verdict: the West’s moral posturing and Russia’s authoritarian realpolitik are mutually reinforcing. Horton clearly condemns Putin’s war crimes in Chechnya, Syria, and Ukraine but insists NATO’s expansion and sabotage of diplomacy validate Moscow’s narrative of Western duplicity. Horton’s warning of “a perpetual nuclear sword hanging over all of our necks” rings with grim urgency: unless we confront the West’s role in provoking this crisis, the cycle of escalation will continue, and the victims will multiply. This is not just a book—it is a 900-page alarm bell, tolling for a world sprinting toward Armageddon.