The story we’ve been told is simple: in February 2022, Vladimir Putin woke up one morning, decided to invade a peaceful, democratic Ukraine, and launched an “unprovoked war.” That’s the official narrative. But history is never that simple.

From the 1990s onward, Moscow warned that NATO expansion into its backyard was a red line. Gorbachev and later Yeltsin were assured that the alliance would not creep eastward. Yet step by step—Poland, Hungary, the Baltics, talk of Georgia and Ukraine—NATO advanced. To Washington, enlargement was “stability.” To Moscow, it was encirclement.

The real break came in 2014. Ukraine’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, leaned toward Moscow on trade and energy. That was unacceptable to Washington and Brussels. When mass protests erupted in Kyiv, the U.S. wasn’t a bystander. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Senator John McCain both appeared on the ground, cheering the crowds. In a leaked call, Nuland infamously dismissed Europe’s hesitance—“F*** the EU”—while handpicking who should form the next government. To Moscow, this was regime change with CIA, State, and USAID fingerprints all over it.

The revolution ousted Yanukovych and installed a Western-leaning government. Overnight, Ukraine shifted from Moscow’s orbit to Brussels’. What followed wasn’t peace. In Donbas, the Russian-speaking east rose in rebellion. Kyiv responded with force. Shelling, rockets, and artillery fire turned towns into rubble. Between 2014 and 2022, more than 14,000 people died in a grinding low-intensity war. For people in Donetsk or Luhansk, the war didn’t begin in 2022—it had already been burning for eight years.

This backstory matters because it reframes 2022. Putin didn’t invade a neutral neighbor out of nowhere. He acted after decades of ignored warnings and eight years of bloodshed in the Donbas. Was the invasion brutal? Yes. Was it unprovoked? Hardly.

Critics will call this “carrying water for Putin.” But acknowledging how the West lit the fuse doesn’t absolve Moscow of blame. It explains why Russia saw the stakes as existential. When Ukraine amended its constitution to commit to NATO membership, Moscow heard one message: eventually, U.S. missiles could sit 300 miles from Moscow. For a nuclear power that lost 27 million lives in World War II, this wasn’t abstract.

The West believed sanctions would collapse Russia’s economy and that Putin would face regime change. Instead, Moscow built its own military-industrial base, deepened ties with China, India, and the BRICS bloc, and weathered the storm. Far from isolating Russia, the war accelerated a global realignment away from dollar dominance.

Meanwhile, Ukraine—brilliant engineers, fertile farmland, energy transit routes—has become a pawn. Western politicians invoke democracy while oligarchs, defense contractors, and energy interests profit. Hunter Biden’s Burisma board seat was not an outlier; it was a symptom of how entangled Washington had become in Ukraine’s internal affairs.

This isn’t a defense of Russia’s invasion. It’s a reminder that wars don’t appear overnight. They build. They escalate. They ignite only after a fuse has been laid. In Ukraine, that fuse was NATO expansion, the 2014 coup, and the long, bloody stalemate in Donbas.

The world didn’t start burning in 2022. We just finally saw the explosion.