The argument you make ignores a few - well, many - ENORMOUS caveats. The key question is security neutrality. Ukraine may have been considered in Russia’s “sphere of influence” economically, culturally and to some degree politically, but on the matter of security that is absolutely not the case.
Since independence it has straddled the line, with several attempts to push closer to the West due to structural security disputes with Russia left over from independence. Just for one example, a nation that was in the Russia sphere of influence would not have sent troops to aid the US occupation of Iraq, an invasion Russia opposed, in order to win favor with the Bush administration.
I really dislike the attempt to frame very commonly use concept of neutrality, which is a term that even NATO scholarship on the issue uses to refer to Ukrainian non-alignment, as “prooaganda”.
I dislike even more when discussions about the history of th issue are met with counterfactuals and hypotheticals. Then it becomes a counterproductive polemical debate where one can claim that Putin and Ukraine would be lovey-dovey besties forever if not for NATO expansion or that Putin would absorb Ukraine in a neo-Soviet Anschluss and march on Riga and Warsaw if not for NATO. It’s not useful framing at all.
If the key question is security neutrality how exactly was the EU-Ukraine association agreement a security issue for Russia? Because Euromaidan wasn’t about joining NATO, it was about wanting the possibility of joining the EU.
The argument you make ignores a few - well, many - ENORMOUS caveats. The key question is security neutrality. Ukraine may have been considered in Russia’s “sphere of influence” economically, culturally and to some degree politically, but on the matter of security that is absolutely not the case.
Since independence it has straddled the line, with several attempts to push closer to the West due to structural security disputes with Russia left over from independence. Just for one example, a nation that was in the Russia sphere of influence would not have sent troops to aid the US occupation of Iraq, an invasion Russia opposed, in order to win favor with the Bush administration.
I really dislike the attempt to frame very commonly use concept of neutrality, which is a term that even NATO scholarship on the issue uses to refer to Ukrainian non-alignment, as “prooaganda”.
I dislike even more when discussions about the history of th issue are met with counterfactuals and hypotheticals. Then it becomes a counterproductive polemical debate where one can claim that Putin and Ukraine would be lovey-dovey besties forever if not for NATO expansion or that Putin would absorb Ukraine in a neo-Soviet Anschluss and march on Riga and Warsaw if not for NATO. It’s not useful framing at all.
If the key question is security neutrality how exactly was the EU-Ukraine association agreement a security issue for Russia? Because Euromaidan wasn’t about joining NATO, it was about wanting the possibility of joining the EU.