Ukraine's membership in NATO was a definite plan

Professor John Mearsheimer explains that the Biden administration had made it abundantly clear, on multiple occasions leading up to the war, that Ukraine's membership in NATO was a definite plan. This message was conveyed at the Brussels NATO Summit in June 2021, outlined in a strategic document in November 2021, and responded to a Russian letter in December 2021.

Additionally, Professor Mearsheimer discusses the security dilemma and highlights why Russia perceives NATO's expansion into Ukraine as a significant threat to its national security:

"They said it in a statement that was made at the Brussels NATO Summit in June of 2021. They said it in a very important strategic document that was issued in November 2021. And when the Russians wrote a letter on December 17th, 2021, asking President Biden to put in writing that Ukraine would not become a member of NATO, Tony Blinken made it clear to the Russians that we rejected that request and that Ukraine would become a part of NATO.

Part two of the story is that Ukraine was effectively a de facto member of NATO by early 2022...We were arming the Ukrainians, we were training the Ukrainians, we were including them in military exercises that we ran, that NATO ran. We were obsessed with interoperability between Ukrainian and NATO fighting forces. So Ukraine was well on its way to developing the military capability to be a NATO member, this idea that there was no chance that Ukraine would ever become part of NATO is a fiction that proponents of the war have invented to defend themselves...

It's virtually impossible to distinguish between defense and offense, whether you're talking about weapons or military strategy, or military plans. So you can have an alliance that you think is defensive in nature. But if you're standing on the other side of the line, it does not look defensive in nature, it looks offensive in nature.

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