‘Boiling Point’: How America lit and fueled the Ukraine war — SkimNews
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- Stephen Kinzer challenges the 'unprovoked invasion' narrative, asserting U.S. policy over 75 years helped provoke the Ukraine war through sustained efforts to turn Ukraine into a strategic adversary of Russia.
- CIA conducted covert operations in Soviet Ukraine starting in the late 1940s, including dropping armed commandos, as part of early Cold War efforts to destabilize Moscow’s control and foster Ukrainian nationalism.
- U.S. administrations spent heavily after 1991 to promote anti-Russian, pro-confrontation groups in Ukraine, accelerating a long-term project to position Ukraine as a geopolitical counterweight to Russia.
- Joe Biden refused to publicly state Ukraine would not join NATO, despite private U.S. acknowledgment it was not ready, a decision Kinzer says eliminated a key diplomatic off-ramp to war.
- Henry Kissinger and Kinzer both advocated for Ukraine to become a neutral, Austria-style buffer state between East and West, arguing this would prevent war and ensure long-term European stability.
- Russia is portrayed by Kinzer not as seeking territorial conquest but as acting on a legitimate security concern—opposing a nuclear-armed military alliance on its border, analogous to the U.S. reaction if China or Russia established bases in Mexico or Canada.
Why it matters: The U.S. and its allies continue to frame the war as a moral defense of sovereignty, but Kinzer’s account shifts blame toward decades of strategic provocation. This reframing risks undermining Western unity if policymakers confront the possibility that their own actions helped cause the conflict, while making neutral settlement models like Austria’s harder to sell as defeat rather than pragmatism.
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