MSNBC   Russia's Ukraine Invasion May Have Been Preventable The U.S. refused to reconsider Ukraine's NATO status as Putin threatened war. Experts say that was a huge mistake. March 4, 2022 By Zeeshan Aleem, MSNBC Opinion Columnist   The prevailing wisdom in the West is that Russian President Vladimir Putin was never interested in President Joe Biden's diplomatic efforts to avert an invasion of Ukraine. Bent on restoring the might of the Soviet empire, this narrative goes, the Russian autocrat audaciously invaded Ukraine to fulfill a revanchist desire for some combination of land, power and glory. In a typical account operating under this framing, Politico described Putin as "the steely-eyed strongman" who proved immune to "traditional tools of diplomacy and deterrence" and had been "playing Biden all along." This telling suggests that the United States exhausted its diplomatic arsenal and that Russia's horrifying and illegal invasion of Ukraine, which has involved targeting civilian areas and shelling nuclear plants, could never have been prevented. But according to a line of widely overlooked scholarship, forgotten warnings from Western statesmen and interviews with several experts — including high-level former government officials who oversaw Russia strategy for decades — this narrative is wrong. Many of these analysts argue that the U.S. erred in its efforts to prevent the breakout of war by refusing to offer to retract support for Ukraine to one day join NATO or substantially reconsider its terms of entry. And they argue that Russia's willingness to go to war over Ukraine's NATO status, which it perceived as an existential national security threat and listed as a fundamental part of its rationale for the invasion, was so clear for so long that dropping support for its eventual entry could have averted the invasion. [Continue Reading]