For those wishing to understand the onraging proxy war in Ukraine, this is book by Canadian journalist Mark Mackinnon is indispensable forensic evidence. Published in 2007, Mackinnon details his firsthand encounters with the post cold war, color-coded regime-changes of Serbia, Georgia, and most especially Ukraine. A cold civil war erupted between the autocratic, top-down "managed democracy" of authoritarians like Putin, Lukanshenko, Kuzma, and Milosevic vs. the Western NGO world. At this stage it was not nuclear, but NGO proliferation and the fungible cash behind it, that outgunned the authoritarians, with democracy itself the clear loser on every side.
The genesis of this was, of course, the desire for NATO expansion. Mackinnon traces it to Zbegniew Brzezinski's "grand chessboard" strategy of detaching Ukraine from Moscow's orbit specifically to neuter Russia as any kind of great power. Note this was articulated in 1997 - before the rise of Putin, with Western ally Yeltsin just placed in power with no small dose of Western help. The emergence of Vladimir Putin was aided by the rise of this Western consensus. Putin's assertiveness in turn galvanized "democracy promotion" to achieve full-spectrum US dominance across Europe.
Despite disgust at authoritarian state manipulation in the affected "regimes," Mackinnon shows that the opposition would have gotten nowhere without foreign (EU and US) backed cashflow, advisors, and materiel, organizing the very opposition groups themselves in an ironic imitation of "Red subversion." And the scope of this aid was kaleidoscopic and breathtaking: NED, the Soros Foundation, institutes here and foundations there, grooming pro-Western personalities like Ukraine's Viktor Yuschenko as new-regime leaders to guide their nations into the EU and NATO. So coordinated was this move that even the same personalities involved in Serbia and Georgia were on hand for Ukraine. Successes there were seen as green lights for Kiev.
The resulting Orange Revolution is covered in meticulous detail, beginning in 2003 with Yuschenko's first courting date early that year. Though 2004 eventually fizzled, it was the precursor of the successful Round Two of Maidan 2014, in turn the precursor of Proxy War 2022. If one really wants to understand the process, Mackinnon's reportage is essential in proving the charge that Western "democracy-promotion", as a tool of NATO expansion, was itself the aggressor in the new cold war; designed, in the cases of Georgia and Ukraine, to block Russia's re-emergence from its 1990s weakness.
Energy needs were also the second leg of this expansion, hence Mackinnon's subtitle of "pipeline politics." Russia's rise as an energy power in Europe was its principal subversion of US/NATO domination - the true battlefield weapon. Internal regime course-change was essential to reverse oil and gas streams. Blowing up the Nordstream lines was the ultimate fruit of this seed. Thus the straight line between Mackinnon's on-the-spot history and your CNN newsfeed. Note the same ones trumpeting Ukraine's "need to win", "to save European democracy," are the same actors who began this chorus twenty years ago, creating war clouds out of once-clear skies..