Last week, the Kremlin said it was finally satisfied with Washington’s position on future NATO membership for Kiev.

“We have heard from Washington at various levels that NATO membership for Ukraine has been ruled out,” Russian spokesman Dmitry Peskov explained. “And of course this is something that brings us satisfaction and coincides with our position that Ukraine should not be a member of NATO and should not have prospects of integration with the North Atlantic Alliance.”

Since 2008, the North Atlantic Alliance has been promising to one day add Ukraine as a member of the bloc. However, Moscow protested Kiev accession to the alliance, arguing that it would present a major national security concern for Russia.

While the American president following Bush did little to make Ukraine a formal member of the bloc, each subsequent president ramped up U.S. support for Ukraine. President Joe Biden finally pushed Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine when he began treating Kiev as a de facto member of the military alliance in 2021.

Putin made several diplomatic overtures in late 2021 and early 2022, seeking to get Washington to take NATO membership off the table for Kiev. However, the top officials in the Biden administration pretended not to understand that Ukraine joining the bloc was a major red line for Russia. This was the provocation that ultimately led Putin to order the invasion of Ukraine.

As Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton explains in his book Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, it was a long-established fact in Washington that Kiev becoming a treaty ally with the United States was going to lead to Russia lashing out at Ukraine. In fact, the best evidence comes from the CIA Director during Biden’s presidency, William Burns, who in 2008, was serving as an American diplomat in Russia.

The following is an excerpt from Provoked. You can order your copy of today. Or sign up for Scott’s Substack to get the audiobook.

‘Nyet’ Means ‘Nyet’

The Memos

In February 2008, Amb. Burns wrote a memo for Secretary of State Rice titled “Nyet Means Nyet.” In the memo, Burns wrote:

During his annual review of Russia’s foreign policy January 22–23, Foreign Minister Lavrov stressed that Russia had to view continued eastward expansion of NATO, particularly to Ukraine and Georgia, as a potential military threat. While Russia might believe statements from the West that NATO was not directed against Russia, when one looked at recent military activities in NATO countries (establishment of U.S. forward operating locations, etc.) they had to be evaluated not by stated intentions but by potential. Lavrov stressed that maintaining Russia’s “sphere of influence” in the neighborhood was anachronistic, and acknowledged that the U.S. and Europe had “legitimate interests” in the region. But, he argued, while countries were free to make their own decisions about their security and which political-military structures to join, they needed to keep in mind the impact on their neighbors. …

During a press briefing January 22 in response to a question about Ukraine’s request for a MAP [NATO Membership Action Plan], the MFA said “a radical new expansion of NATO may bring about a serious political-military shift that will inevitably affect the security interests of Russia.” The spokesman went on to stress that Russia was bound with Ukraine by bilateral obligations set forth in the 1997 Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership in which both parties undertook to “refrain from participation in or support of any actions capable of prejudicing the security of the other Side.” The spokesman noted that Ukraine’s “likely integration into NATO would seriously complicate the many-sided Russian-Ukrainian relations,” and that Russia would “have to take appropriate measures.” The spokesman added that “one has the impression that the present Ukrainian leadership regards rapprochement with NATO largely as an alternative to good-neighborly ties with the Russian Federation.”

Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.

Dmitriy Trenin, Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, expressed concern that Ukraine was, in the long-term, the most potentially destabilizing factor in U.S.-Russian relations, given the level of emotion and neuralgia triggered by its quest for NATO membership. The letter requesting MAP consideration had come as a “bad surprise” to Russian officials, who calculated that Ukraine’s NATO aspirations were safely on the backburner. With its public letter, the issue had been “sharpened.” Because membership remained divisive in Ukrainian domestic politics, it created an opening for Russian intervention. Trenin expressed concern that elements within the Russian establishment would be encouraged to meddle, stimulating U.S. overt encouragement of opposing political forces, and leaving the U.S. and Russia in a classic confrontational posture.

With respect to Georgia, most experts said that while not as neuralgic to Russia as Ukraine, the GOR [government of Russia] viewed the situation there as too unstable to withstand the divisiveness NATO membership could cause. Aleksey Arbatov, Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, argued that Georgia’s NATO aspirations were simply a way to solve its problems in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and warned that Russia would be put in a difficult situation were that to ensue.

The GOR has made it clear that it would have to “seriously review” its entire relationship with Ukraine and Georgia in the event of NATO inviting them to join. This could include major impacts on energy, economic, and political-military engagement, with possible repercussions throughout the region and into Central and Western Europe. Russia would also likely revisit its own relationship with the Alliance and activities in the NATO-Russia Council, and consider further actions in the arms control arena, including the possibility of complete withdrawal from the CFE and INF Treaties, and more direct threats against U.S. missile defense plans.

Burns added in his personal comment at the end:

Russia’s opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia is both emotional and based on perceived strategic concerns about the impact on Russia’s interests in the region. It is also politically popular to paint the U.S. and NATO as Russia’s adversaries and to use NATO’s outreach to Ukraine and Georgia as a means of generating support from Russian nationalists. While Russian opposition to the first round of NATO enlargement in the mid-1990’s [sic] was strong, Russia now feels itself able to respond more forcefully to what it perceives as actions contrary to its national interests.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sacrificed his life and liberty to the darkest dungeons of the empire for years to bring us this information.

In March, soon after the United States officially recognized Kosovo’s “independence” under continued EU stewardship over Russia’s strenuous objection, Burns met with Putin, telling him that the U.S. would push to offer a NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) to Ukraine and Georgia, but that this “should not be seen as threatening.” Putin responded:

No Russian leader could stand idly by in the face of steps toward NATO membership for Ukraine. That would be a hostile act toward Russia. Even President Chubais or President Kasyanov [two of Russia’s better-known liberals –Burns] would have to fight back on this issue. We would do all in our power to prevent it. If people want to limit and weaken Russia, why do they have to do it through NATO enlargement? Doesn’t your government know that Ukraine is unstable and immature politically, and NATO is a very divisive issue there? Don’t you know that Ukraine is not even a real country? Part is really East European, and part is really Russian. This would be another mistake in American diplomacy.

In a personal email to Secretary Rice from April 2008, Burns advised her not to do it:

I fully understand how difficult a decision to hold off on MAP will be. But it’s equally hard to overstate the strategic consequences of a premature MAP offer, especially to Ukraine. 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 knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests. At this stage, a MAP offer would be seen not as a technical step along a long road toward membership, but as throwing down the strategic gauntlet. Today’s Russia will respond. Russian-Ukrainian relations will go into a deep freeze. … It will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. … The prospects of subsequent Russian-Georgian armed conflict would be high.

If, in the end, we decided to push MAP offers for Ukraine and Georgia, you can probably stop reading here. I can conceive of no grand package that would allow the Russians to swallow this pill quietly.

Burns said that though he thought Rice and Defense Secretary Gates shared at least some of his concerns, momentum was still behind a “legacy-building effort” to begin the process of bringing the two into the NATO alliance. Burns later wrote in his memoir, recalling George Kennan’s warnings against expansion in the 1990s, that he thought Kennan had spoken too soon regarding the first and even second major wave of NATO expansion under Clinton and W. Bush:

It damaged prospects for future relations with Russia, but not fatally. Where we made a serious strategic mistake — and where Kennan was prescient — was in later letting inertia drive us to push for NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, despite Russia’s deep historical attachments to both states and even stronger protestations. That did indelible damage, and fed the appetite of a future Russian leadership for getting even. …

Yeltsin had gnashed his teeth over the first wave, but couldn’t do much about it. Putin offered little resistance to Baltic membership, amid all the other preoccupations of his first term. Georgia, and especially Ukraine, were different animals altogether. There could be no doubt that Putin would fight back hard against any steps in the direction of NATO membership for either state.

In Washington, however, there was a kind of geopolitical and ideological inertia at work, with strong interest from Vice President Cheney and large parts of the interagency bureaucracy in a “Membership Action Plan” (MAP) for Ukraine and Georgia. Key European allies, in particular Germany and France, were dead set against offering it. They were disinclined to add to mounting friction between Moscow and the West — and unprepared to commit themselves formally and militarily to the defense of Tbilisi or Kyiv against the Russians. The Bush administration understood the objections, but still felt it could finesse the issue.

But the administration was whistling past the graveyard. In 2005, while admitting that the population of Ukraine would not support joining the NATO alliance, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Daniel Fried told Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, an adviser to French President Jacques Chirac, wisely, that there was a distinct lack of consensus for alliance membership in Ukraine. However, he added, foolishly, that a minor issue like Ukrainian public opinion was a greater impediment to the policy than the determination of the Russian president to prevent it. According to a State Department summary, Fried “dismissed prospects for Russia intervening militarily in the Ukraine, noting the capacity of the latter’s army and cautioned against exaggerating the split between Eastern and Western Ukraine.”