We have only to look at ourselves to find most of the answers. NATO itself set the scene for what followed in Ukraine. Back in 2008 it gave Ukraine its naive promise of NATO membership; a promise of collective defense that could never have been implemented militarily. The logistical challenge of assembling sufficient NATO combat power to protect Ukraine’s eastern border should have been blindingly obvious, even to politicians who had grown up in a time of peace and knew nothing about war fighting. Put simply, Ukraine is just too far away to defend if attacked by Russia.

Furthermore, this posturing by the West only fed a deep-seated Russian paranoia about a perceived NATO strategy of ever-increasing containment. After all, during the Cold War, the Eastern Bloc countries had stood as a buffer between the borders of Mother Russia and democratic Europe. And be under no illusions, the Russians know all about being attacked from the West. This promise to Ukraine of NATO membership would have put yet another NATO country right on the Russian border. So, add to this Russian fear of encirclement the sense of profound dishonor following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent chaos in Russia in the 1990s, and the result for proud Russians was a toxic brew.

We in the West might struggle to understand that real sense of personal dishonor felt so deeply by patriotic young officers who had served in the military and KGB at the apogee of Soviet power—men like the President—but that sense of dishonor is real and we need to accept it and factor it into our calculations.

Of course, Putin had already shown himself to be a ruthless opportunist when he took the cool and brutal decision to invade Georgia back in 2008, at the exact moment the world’s attention was focused on the Beijing Olympic Games. Despite this, after some perfunctory initial protests, the West quickly returned to business as usual. After all, Georgia was so far beyond NATO’s sphere of influence and so deep in Russia’s, there was little we could do. So an initial Russian toe in the invasion waters had shown Putin what he could get away with; Hitler and the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 came strongly to my mind, even as far back as 2008.

If this were not bad enough, there were other political and military blunders which, compounded together, gave an impression of growing Western weakness to the ever-watching Russians.