Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton have built a sprawling network of powerful friends around the globe, one that could aid Mrs. Clinton’s chances were she to seek the presidency. But those relationships often come with intersecting interests and political complications; few people illustrate that more vividly than the Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk.

A steel magnate and major contributor to the former president’s foundation, Mr. Pinchuk was in frequent contact with Mrs. Clinton’s State Department, at meetings arranged by a Clinton political operative turned lobbyist, Douglas E. Schoen.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/us/politics/trade-dispute-centers-on-ukrainian-executive-with-ties-to-clintons.html

https://thewashingtonstandard.com/29000000-plus-tied-the-clintons-to-ukraine/

David Hunter served as a diplomat to Ukraine during the Clinton administration. He now lives in Vero Beach. And right now, he's monitoring events overseas with great concern.

"I think it would not be a bad idea for all Americans to realize that this could spiral into a direct confrontation between Russia and NATO," Hunter warned.

https://cbs12.com/news/local/former-ukraine-diplomat-david-hunter-vero-beach-russia-vladimir-putin-conflict

Has Vladimir Putin been lured into Ukraine? Did he really imagine that it would be an easy two day outing? Something he did not put into his calculus was the years of planning at the Pentagon, Langley and the British military intelligence to entrap him. But then who knows ! Putin may have counter moves up his sleeve. He is an exceptional chess player.

Lethal equipment was obviously stationed in Ukraine by the West much before the war drums rolled. In fact the chorus, “Putin is about to invade”, was raised after the equipment was in place and duly manned. Who will ever find out that the men in uniform behind the fancier machines were Ukrainians, Poles or British?

Russians acted on a script they have been refining since the Orange Revolution of November 2004. The crisis has been building up from much earlier though. Let me pick a few dates arbitrarily:

Mikhail Gorbachev, who single handedly reduced the Soviet Empire to modern Russia, had serious concerns about a reunified Germany in NATO. James Baker, Bush Senior’s Secretary of State, an old fashioned diplomat, reliable, not flighty, prevailed on Gorbachev on the German question, but promised that NATO would not move closer to Russia even “by an inch”.

https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/opinion/clinton-gives-the-game-away-bleed-russians-in-ukraine-like-afghanistan

https://www.abc10.com/video/news/nation-world/former-russian-top-diplomat-says-russia-will-not-stop-with-ukraine/103-f3ba4713-d4ec-4e11-8733-99c0448d5c3d

https://time.com/6138496/wendy-sherman-russia-ukraine-talks/

The July 25 phone call that sparked the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry famously included President Trump’s request that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “look into” corruption allegations against former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. The call also included Trump’s request to look into alleged Ukrainian 2016 election interference.

In a January 2017 report, Politico’s Kenneth Vogel and David Stern, citing multiple sources familiar with the matter, reported that the Ukrainian government attempted to “help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump” in 2016.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-lawyer-meets-with-diplomat-who-says-ukraine-conspired-with-dnc-against-trump

When tens of thousands of Russian troops started moving toward the Ukrainian border late last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin effectively issued an ultimatum: They won’t go home until he had “concrete agreements prohibiting any further eastward expansion of NATO.”

This week, as the US and Russia exchange formal diplomatic letters, Secretary of State Antony Blinken emphasized that “NATO’s door is open, remains open, and that is our commitment.”

But few have been asking why the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would want to move east in the first place. What was once a Cold War security pact has become a 21st-century organization with global military commitments and ever more member countries from Eastern Europe. Members of the alliance didn’t always foresee its expansion and, three decades ago, some of America’s most renowned foreign policy thinkers argued that NATO should be nowhere near Ukraine.

Ukraine is a former Soviet republic. It isn’t joining NATO anytime soon, and President Joe Biden has said as much. Still, NATO’s open-door policy — the alliance’s foundational principle that any qualified European country could join — cuts both ways. To the West, it’s a statement of autonomy; to Russia, it’s a threat. The core of the NATO treaty is Article 5, a commitment that an attack on any country is treated as an attack on the entire alliance — meaning any Russian military engagement with a hypothetical NATO-member Ukraine would theoretically bring Moscow into conflict with the US, the UK, France, and the 27 other NATO members.

https://www.vox.com/22900113/nato-ukraine-russia-crisis-clinton-expansion