President Trump says Ukraine can “forget about” joining NATO. “That is probably the reason why the whole thing started,” he said. Usually, you won’t hear a president say it so definitively. After he commented, mainstream media loudly claimed that he’s repeating Russian talking points.

From the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we were told NATO expansion had nothing to do with starting the war.

Why would anyone believe that?

Jens Stoltenberg once admitted that NATO’s endless expansion to Russia’s border was likely the trigger.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg previously said that Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his criminal war as a reaction to the possibility of NATO expanding into Ukraine and the alliance’s refusal to swear it off on several occasions.

“President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement,” Stoltenberg told a joint committee meeting of the European Parliament on September 7. “That was what he sent us. And [that] was a pre-condition for not invade [sic] Ukraine. Of course, we didn’t sign that.”

“He went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite,” Stoltenberg reiterated, referring to the accession of Sweden and Finland into the alliance in response to Putin’s invasion. Their entry, he later insisted, “demonstrates that when President Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO, he’s getting the exact opposite.”