You can find Putin's speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 with English subtitles on youtube. In principle, this speech had already predicted much of what later came to pass. At that time, Ms Politkovskaya had already been poisoned for three years. I can completely understand Mearsheimer's reasoning. But it is not a black and white game. It was not "NATO" that expanded towards Russia, it was the former Russian-occupied states that wanted to join NATO. Nevertheless, a lot of things went wrong, already in the 90s. Other members here may be much more familiar with recent history than I am, and it would go beyond the scope of this article to go into all possible aspects. But to come back to Mearsheimer. Ukraine has had a very troubled history for centuries. It was the majority of the Ukrainian population that saw annexation to the West as the only alternative. It was not the Americans who had to tempt them. And yet, I was not comfortable with the way the Maidan was derailed in 2014. But that was Putin's wake-up call to become a mass murderer because he couldn't stand a pro-European Ukraine. Not only because of strategic threats but because he was already a nationalist psychopath in 2014.
