Was the West determined to transform Ukraine into a pro-Western democracy? The United States and Europe pumped several billions of dollars into Ukrainian civil society projects since 1991, while remaining indifferent to the Leonid Kuchma regime’s slide toward authoritarianism in the late 1990s, the abandonment by Yushchenko’s “Orange government†of its democratic reform agenda and Viktor Yanukovych’s establishment of a full-fledged authoritarian regime in 2010-2013.
Some Western policymakers supported the Maidan Revolution rhetorically and insisted that Yanukovych seek a compromise with the democratic revolutionaries; but most did not. No Western state actually provided any material assistance to the Maidan.
And no Western presidents or prime ministers called on Yanukovych to step down during the revolution: Quite the contrary, they traveled to Kiev in late February 2014 with the express purpose of saving him. Once he abandoned his office, many Western policymakers welcomed his move—but that was after, and not before, the fact.
Did NATO ever push Ukraine to join the alliance? The answer is no. And for good reason: It was (and still is) unready to make the commitment, under its Article 5, to rush to Ukraine’s assistance in case of an attack by Russia.
Three months after the Yushchenko government formally requested a “membership action plan†as a first step toward joining NATO, the alliance’s North Atlantic Council in April 2008 issued the vaguest “welcome†possible of “Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership.†While NATO declined to repudiate the Open Door principle it had declared a decade earlier (with the less vulnerable and more viable Poland and Czech Republic in mind), it also dampened the Yushchenko government’s ardor, declining to issue the requested membership plan and promising instead to talk about it.
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Putin's Real MotiveDid Putin seize the Crimea because of the West’s desire to transform Ukraine into its bastion? From the start, Putin has explained the seizure in terms of some putative need to protect Russians from the “fascist junta†in Kiev and to bring “sacred†Russian territory back into the fold. He began invoking the Western threat only after war with Ukraine had broken out and the West chose to support Kiev.
The fact is that Putin unleashed war against Ukraine for the same reasons that Saddam Hussein unleashed war against revolutionary Iran in 1980: to prevent revolutionary contagion, to punish the revolutionaries and to take advantage of their weakness to make territorial gains.
Supporters of the view that NATO enlargement provoked Russia are right about one thing. Enlarging NATO in 2004, just as Putin was consolidating his authoritarian regime and developing visions of imperial expansion, created an impossible security conundrum for Ukraine. NATO enlargement effectively sent Russia an unmistakably strong signal: that Ukraine was outside the West’s security interests and thus was fair game for Russia.
http://www.newsweek.com/putins-invasion-ukraine-dont-blame-west-311996 
