Putin is defending his 1200 mile long with Ukraine from a hostile military alliance.
Brzezinski laid it out clearly in 1997:
The U.S. proxy war in Ukraine | MR Online
"But the goal was the Ukraine.
"Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was the most important strategist of all of this and had been Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor said in his 1997
Grand Chessboard that
Ukraine was the 'geopolitical pivot,' particularly in the West, which if it were brought into NATO and under Western control, would weaken Russia so much that it could be tethered, if not dismembered.
"This has been the goal all along and U.S. strategic planners and Washington officials, along with the NATO allies, have stated over and over that they wanted to bring the Ukraine into NATO.
"NATO made this goal official in 2008.
"Only a few months ago, in November 2021 in the new strategic charter between the Biden administration in Washington and Zelensky government in Kyiv, it was agreed that the immediate aim was bring Ukraine into NATO.
"But this has also been NATO’s policy for a long time now.
"The United States in the final months of 2021 and at the beginning of 2022 was moving very fast to militarize the Ukraine and accomplish that as a
fait accompli."