What did we do here? Whose fault is it now?

 "Down to the last few weeks, there’s been this very strange dynamic where the United States — which does, for all our intelligence failures, seem to have pretty good intel on what the Russians are up to — kept issuing warnings of, it’s really happening. The Russians are really planning to invade. And the Ukrainian government will say, oh, stop sowing panic, and we don’t think an invasion is imminent and so on. 

I do think that for very idealistic reasons, some Ukrainian nationalists talked themselves into the idea that Putin would never move like this or the idea that in the extreme event, the West would come to their aid more than was ever quite reasonable and plausible.

There is also the question of to what extent — what is actually driving Putin’s decision-making here, right? Is it NATO? Is it his sort of mystical idea of the Ukrainian-Russian connection and the idea that you can’t detach Ukraine from Russia? Is it sort of immediate things — the crackdowns on pro-Russian parties and Russian language education and stuff in Ukraine? Presumably, it’s all of those at some level. But you can’t say definitively that if there hadn’t been this one provocative step, it wouldn’t have come to this.

But what’s clear is that the United States’ and the West’s policy toward Ukraine in general was conditioned on this sense that we could invest there on a scale that wouldn’t deter Putin. We knew it wouldn’t deter Putin, but it would all work out, nonetheless. And now that we invested heavily in Ukrainian government that we can’t defend and is in danger of being destroyed, that is the sort of reality of power politics right now."