Andrew Bacevich | video | Ukraine is Paying the Price for the U.S. “Recklessly” Pushing NATO Expansion | aired March 11, 2022

"Current director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Burns wrote, 'sitting at the embassy in Moscow in the mid-nineties, it seemed to me that NATO expansion was premature at best and needlessly provocative at worst.' And then in 1995, Burns wrote a memo saying, 'Hostility to early NATO expansion is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.' He’s talking about Russia. In another memo Burns wrote, 'Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.'"