Brewing Russia-Ukraine tensions : No clean hands in the crisis

RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin's decision to officially recognise the 2 breakaway regions on the Ukraine border as independent states and send in so-called peacekeepers falls short of the full-scale invasion that everyone in the West has been expecting for some weeks now.

Of course, there is plenty of drama. Following Putin's announcement, a UN Security Council meeting was summoned. Major Western powers readied their security apparatus as did Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But so far, most of Russia's 130,000 soldiers remain on their side of the border.

What to make of the situation? Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) has taken in most of the European nations that were once in the communist sphere. But Moscow thinks that in so doing, the West has reneged on the original deal: Russia would allow East Germany to reunite with the Western half under Nato in return for a pledge that the defence organisation would not expand eastwards. But over the course of 2 decades since the 1990s, Nato expanded thrice to the east. First the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland were admitted to the fold. Then 7 more countries even farther east, including the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In 2009, Albania and Croatia became members.