In 2002, the US refused Putin (who was then still a quite democratic ruler) the offer to join NATO. At the same time, it became known that Ukraine was being invited to NATO.
This was a geopolitical decision by the US, directed against the main strategic adversary of the US at that time - i.e. the European Union, or, more precisely, its main country - Germany.
At that moment, the EU was rapidly expanding, absorbing the accretion disk left after the collapse of the USSR and the countries of the socialist camp.
The entry of Russia (and, of course, all intermediate countries) into NATO and, of course, the EU meant a huge European Union of 650 million people, with cheap energy and a cheap Slavic population of Russia and Ukraine, who would go, like Ostarbeiters, to work in German factories.
This was the specter of a German-Russian alliance that would destroy the American-centric world.
Russia's non-entry into NATO guaranteed that at some point there would be a war in Europe.
The promise to Ukraine that it would be taken into NATO and the EU on the condition that it make itself anti-Russia, and the construction in Ukraine of an activistocracy and a pseudo-colonial system, in which USAID-funded NGOs, on the one hand, direct the development of the pseudo-colony in the desired direction, and on the other hand, are not responsible for the results of such a policy, was only a catalyst for the process.
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