We’ve previously reported that it’s the West’s encirclement of Russia – breaking a key promise which led to the break-up of the Soviet Union – which is behind the Ukraine crisis.

We’ve also noted:

The news is starting to go mainstream …

Specifically, the Council On Foreign Relations (CFR) is a very mainstream, hawkish group.

CFR’s flagship publication – Foreign Affairs – has just published a piece blaming the Ukraine crisis on the West.

The must-read piece by John Mearsheimer – in it’s September/October 2014 issue – accurately notes:

The United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU’s expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine — beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004 — were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president — which he rightly labeled a “coup” — was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West. Putin’s pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West had been moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly. *** In [a] 1998 interview, [the top American expert on Russia, George] Kennan predicted that NATO expansion would provoke a crisis, after which the proponents of expansion would “say that we always told you that is how the Russians are.” As if on cue, most Western officials have portrayed Putin as the real culprit in the Ukraine predicament.

Mearsheimer notes that the U.S. backed the Ukrainian coup. And he points out that Washington would not react kindly if China built a military alliance on American borders, which included Canada and Mexico … but that’s exactly what we’re trying to do to Russia.

Mearsheimer gives a way out of this mess: stop trying to westernize Ukraine and shove it into NATO, and allow NATO to become a buffer between Russia and NATO.

Will saner heads prevail, and back away from the abyss before it’s too late?

And see this.