An American political scientist has accused the European Union and the United States of starting the Ukrainian conflict.

The reason for the conflict in Ukraine was the actions of the United States and the European Union (EU) countries. This was announced on May 23 by John Mearsheimer, a professor at the University of Chicago.

"Since April 2008, when NATO announced its intention to accept Ukraine into the alliance, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has made it clear that he and the Russian elite view Ukraine's membership in NATO as an existential threat to Russia. Since then, he has been acting consistently, following this belief. <...> From the point of view of Russia's interests, he acted strategically correctly," the Mysl Polska portal quotes him as saying.

Mearsheimer also called on the EU to start taking Putin seriously. The professor recalled that during the Cold War, it was unacceptable for the United States to deploy Soviet missiles in Cuba, and the 35th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, then made it clear to the Soviet Union that Washington would use military force if the missiles were not removed.

"I would probably do the same thing as Putin. I would have started this even earlier. The problem is that most people in the West do not consider the expansion of NATO in Ukraine to be an existential threat, but it is easy to talk about this while sitting in Switzerland. However, for Russia, which has a history of aggression from the West, this is a cause for concern," Mearsheimer said.

"To justify spending on defense, the EU needs a crisis"

MEP Rada Laikova — on the militarization of the region, support for Ukraine and the attitude of Bulgarians towards Russia

Alexander Kamkin, a German political scientist and senior researcher at IMEMO RAS named after E.M. Primakov, said on May 23 that Europe would not be able to cope with the current volume of support for Ukraine without the United States, adding that defense plants in Europe are now being laid at double speed.