Those who believe that Putin is another Hitler who wants to rollover Ukraine and conquer the rest of the Europe to rebuild the Warsaw pact would do well to read the latest post by The Dissident on former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg's new book.

[https://the307.substack.com/p/in-new-book-former-nato-secretary]

In New Book Former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg Admits That NATO Provoked Ukraine War.

Reading Between The Lines, Jens Stoltenberg, The Former Secretary General of NATO De-Facto Admits That NATO Provoked The War In Ukraine.

Recounting another 2014 conversation with Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov, Stoltenberg recounted that Lavrov said, “it was the coup against President Viktor Yanukovych that was illegal. A democratically elected president! You supported the coup leaders at Maidan Square in 2014 … What about NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999, Secretary General Stoltenberg? An unlawful military action, a war crime, and then you accuse us of breaking international law? What gives you the right to do that? And since we’re speaking of international law – what about Libya in 2011? We trusted you, we supported the resolution of the Security Council. But you used and abused the resolution to kill the country’s head of state. How can we ever trust you again? How can you defend such an act?”.

Then In 2015:

Jens Stoltenberg recounts a 2015 meeting between himself and Henry Kissinger where Kissinger told him, “The West must understand that for Russia, Ukraine will never be just another foreign country. Russia’s own history begins in Kyiv. Some of the most important battles for Russia’s own freedom were fought on Ukrainian soil” adding that, “Kissinger was against Ukrainian NATO membership, and generally sceptical about NATO’s enlargement eastwards since the end of the Cold War. He was concerned that the Ukraine crisis was all too often presented as a choice between two mutually exclusive alternatives: whether Ukraine moved towards the East or the West. ‘If Ukraine is to survive and grow as a nation, the country cannot become the West’s outpost against the East, or the East’s outpost against the West. The country must become a bridge between East and West,’ he said.”

Naturally his conclusion is that Russia suffered a strategic defeat by invading Ukraine as it ended up with more NATO not less (e.g. by the addition of Finland and Sweden to NATO) but what this essentially admits is that this war was all about 'defensive' NATO 'defeating' Russia.
 
Now whether you agree that NATO's job is to defeat Russia or not, it's quite clear from the former Secretary - if it ever wasn't - that it was Ukraine's membership of NATO that largely provoked the war - that and an illegal coup followed by the crackdown on Russia speakers in the Eastern Ukraine diaspora that killed thousands.
 
Instead of becoming a 'bridge' Ukraine has become a depopulated wasteland and all in the name of a 'strategic defeat' of Russia by NATO. 

The horror.