How West's policies led to Ukraine crisis

The policies of the United States and NATO and their connection to the Ukraine-Russia conflict are not regularly examined in Western discourse, which mostly presents a uniform view of the situation.

"If we don't understand how Western policy helped lead to this conflict and we don't work to veer away from similar mistakes in the future, conflict and war is forever inevitable … opposition in Russia to NATO expansion goes well beyond the single figure of Putin," Branko Marcetic, a staff writer for Jacobin, a socialist magazine in New York, wrote on March 7. "The Orwellian attacks on critics of NATO policy must stop."

Marcetic also noted China's attempts to help de-escalate the situation, and suggested the US and NATO take the same approach.