“Russia and the United States tend to view Ukraine as a key battleground in a cosmic proxy war between East and West. Both have a bad habit of trying to pick winners in Ukrainian politics. These interventions, naive in their own ways, tend to backfire, often at Ukraine’s expense.” (“The Difficulty of Being Ukraine” IHT, 2009 )
https://florianpantazi.substack.com/p/is-the-us-blameless-for-the-war-in