Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe. 

Perhaps for Russian President Vladimir Putin, the assertion that he was forced to invade Ukraine due to what he claims has been NATO’s relentless and heedless expansion to the borders of the Russian Federation isn’t a lie.

After all, “the man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth,” as noted in Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov.”

The Russian leader’s seething resentment at the collapse of the Soviet empire — “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” as he once labeled it — has long been marinated in this lie he keeps telling himself as well as anyone who’ll listen.

Since he was first elected in 2000, the idea of restoring Russia’s empire and its status as a great power has underpinned Putin’s foreign policy. And every setback, every recoil from a bear hug by Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltics have merely spurred him on.

One could easily chronicle Putin’s stewing grievances across his set piece speeches over the past quarter of a century.

At first, he was wheedling: In 2000, while visiting London as acting Russian president, he hazarded that Russia could one day join NATO: “Why not? Why not … I do not rule out such a possibility … Russia is a part of European culture, and I do not consider my own country in isolation from Europe … Therefore, it is with difficulty that I imagine NATO as an enemy.”

Then, in May 2004, in a keynote speech broadcast on Russian television, he said: “The expansion of the European Union must not only bring us closer geographically, but also economically and spiritually.”

However, this closeness and the possibility of NATO accession were always conditional — all part of Putin’s determination for Russia to once again be seen as a great power and an equal to the U.S. His belief that there should be respect for Moscow’s authority over the so-called near abroad, and that Central Europe’s former Soviet satellites should be cautious not to overstep.

But the will of free peoples and color revolutions wrecked all that. For Putin, popular uprisings — or a nation’s desire to join the Western alliance — couldn’t possibly be legitimate or genuine. Free choice would, of course, clash with his grand lie. So, for him, the West manipulates everything. For Putin, Ukraine’s Maidan revolution and the ouster of Moscow’s satrap Viktor Yanukovych was just another way station on the long path of Western-orchestrated Russian humiliation.

“We will not allow the situation to be rocked at home and will not allow so-called color revolutions to take place,” he gruffly informed the leaders of a Russian-led collective security alliance just weeks before invading Ukraine in 2022.

But Putin’s tone and ideas had hardened long before he ordered Russian tanks into Ukraine. And he always had the same complaint — that the West lied to Russia by expanding eastward, right up to Russia’s borders.

At the Munich Security Conference in 2007 he demanded, “What happened to the assurances our Western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?” Then, in a Kremlin speech after Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, he accused Western leaders of having “lied to us many times, made decisions behind our backs, placed before us an accomplished fact. This happened with NATO’s expansion to the east.”

After that speech, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer highlighted the fact that “Western leaders never pledged not to enlarge NATO.” But that the story “fits so well with the picture that the Russian leader seeks to paint of an aggrieved Russia, taken advantage of by others and increasingly isolated — not due to its own actions, but because of the machinations of a deceitful West.” 

And despite Putin’s claims that assurances were given to Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1990s, most Western scholars and historians who’ve closely studied the diplomatic memos, meeting minutes and transcripts released by both sides haven’t been able find any such clear pledges either.

Putin, for his part, cites former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker telling Gorbachev in 1990 that “NATO will not move one inch further east” as evidence. However, he took that remark out of context. “The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all,” Gorbachev confirmed in a 2014 interview. The comment was made only in relation to NATO not deploying large armed forces “on the territory of the then-GDR [German Democratic Republic] after German reunification,” he said.

So, for most Western leaders and officials, the Kremlin’s grievances and fears over NATO’s expansion are delusional at best, or simply a pretext to redraft Europe’s security architecture with Putin as its chief designer. Consider for a moment the hybrid warfare and hostile acts the Kremlin has conducted against the West for years, and the aggressive revanchist steps Putin has taken in a bid to turn back the clock.

We’ve seen cyberattacks targeting American and European nuclear power plants and other utility infrastructure, the nerve-agent assassination attempt on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal on British soil, disinformation campaigns seeking to meddle in Western elections and the funding of disruptive right-wing and left-wing populist parties as part of an effort to destabilize the West. Then place all that alongside the Kremlin-directed writing of a new history curriculum for Russian schoolchildren and the dreary weaponization of memory, casting Russia as the victim of so-called Western aggression.

Writing in a British newspaper in 2018 about the Skripal poisoning, then-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson accused Russia of “resorting to its usual strategy of trying to conceal the needle of truth in a haystack of lies,” placing the nerve-agent attack in a long line of hostile Russian acts. “No one is fooled,” he wrote.

But, alas, some Western politicians apparently are.

Step forward Nigel Farage, Britain’s combative Brexiteer and populist agent provocateur. He hit back furiously after being dubbed “Putin’s poodle” for remarking that the “ever eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union” provoked Putin to launch his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “We have provoked this war,” he said.

How? By being reluctant to relinquish a post-Cold War peace dividend and not keeping pace with Russian rearmament?

Of course, Farage inadvertently let the cat out of the bag, bungling his comment by adding that NATO and the EU gave Putin “an excuse” to make war. In other words, Putin was going to do whatever he wanted regardless. He would have just come up with another excuse, another great lie.

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