BOILING POINT: How America Brought War to Ukraine, by Stephen Kinzer
In the past four years, pundits, journalists and historians have thrown out a lot of explanations for why the war in Ukraine began. Some point to Covid-induced hysteria in the Kremlin, others to Soviet nostalgia. Some have even suggested that geography is destiny — as long as Russia exists, it will want the land on its borders.
“Boiling Point,” by the former New York Times journalist Stephen Kinzer, points the finger the other way. Based largely on secondary sources, the book may be the most comprehensive accounting of the United States’ long involvement in Ukraine, from the end of World War II until the Russian invasion. It is also among the clearest articulations of an iconoclastic, wildly counterintuitive argument — namely, that America and NATO, not Russia, are principally responsible for the war in Ukraine.
In a way, this contention is not surprising coming from Kinzer, whose rightly celebrated books — from “All the Shah’s Men” to “The Brothers” — have centered on the harm done by U.S. intervention during the Cold War in countries like Iran, Congo and Guatemala.
Kinzer is also not the first American public intellectual to make this case. In 2014, shortly after Russia occupied Crimea, the international relations scholar John Mearsheimer argued in Foreign Affairs that the crisis was the “West’s fault.” In order to appease Moscow, American and European officials should have been content to “make” Ukraine “a neutral buffer between NATO and Russia.”
“Boiling Point” starts much earlier than the recent conflict. Beginning in the 1940s, Kinzer writes, the United States trained and armed anti-Soviet Ukrainian partisans, parachuting them into the country in a campaign to foment rebellion. The plans were half-baked; most of the participants were swiftly captured and killed. “You’re just sending people to their deaths,” one disillusioned C.I.A. officer told his colleagues at the time.
For decades after, Americans funded — sometimes covertly, often openly — all manner of oppositionist activity through dissident media outlets and, later, nonprofits. In the 1950s, the C.I.A. backed a radio station that broadcast from Germany into Ukraine. It also partnered with a publisher in New York whose pamphlets and articles were dropped into the country by balloon. “Some were printed on paper that would dissolve in water,” Kinzer notes, “so they could be flushed away in case of a police raid.”
Much of this was driven, we are told, by zealous Eastern European refugees or their descendants, like the billionaire philanthropist George Soros, the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke and the former U.S. ambassador to NATO Victoria Nuland, who, according to Kinzer, had “imbibed anti-Russia passion with her mother’s milk.”
By the time President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Kinzer contends, the country was “a fully compliant proxy of the United States.”
Like his predecessors, Kinzer also stresses NATO enlargement as the taproot of hostility between Moscow and the West. Since the end of the Cold War, the alliance has welcomed 16 new members, most of them from what Moscow regards as its historic sphere of influence. In 1994, Ukraine joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace, a program seen as a steppingstone to membership. Five years later, over Russian objections, NATO forces bombed Yugoslavia.
By that point, Kinzer writes, “no one in the Kremlin could avoid recognizing that Russia’s ultimate security nightmare — Ukrainian membership in a hostile military alliance — was beginning to become real.” In Kinzer’s view, it was this intolerable possibility, and the West’s cavalier disrespect for Russia’s “security concerns,” that would cause the country’s elites to lose faith in the United States and, many years later, compel Putin to attack Ukraine.
This is an unfalsifiable thesis. We can only speculate about how Russia’s position might have developed in the absence of NATO enlargement. But the opposite hypothetical is just as hard to disprove. As a pair of ambassadors who served between Poland and the United States argued in 2024: “If NATO enlargement had not taken place, then Europe might now be dealing with Russian domination of Ukraine, re-occupation of the Baltics and the direct threat of an invasion of Poland.”
The trouble with fixating on Putin’s ostensible concerns over Ukraine’s future in NATO is that, well, there were no imminent plans for Ukraine to join. Despite decades of deepening ties, the country remains outside the organization. In February 2022, as Russian troops amassed on Ukraine’s border, the German chancellor Olaf Scholz told reporters that the Kremlin was forcing “a military conflict about an issue that isn’t even on the agenda.”
Although Kinzer doesn’t endorse Putin’s war on Ukraine, he condemns it only briefly and with qualifications: The invasion was but “a single snapshot,” he writes, “in a long film.” The implication is that after years of provocations from the United States and Europe, Russia finally rose from her knees and fought back: “Any other president of Russia would, at that moment, almost certainly have reacted as he did.” Really? Would a President Boris Nemtsov? Or a President Aleksei Navalny?
The former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul has argued that what Putin feared was not Ukraine’s long-term plans to join NATO, or his even more specious claims about neo-Nazis in Kyiv, but “a successful, flourishing and democratic Ukraine on his borders.” It was that very real threat that undermined “the Kremlin’s own regime stability.” If millions of Russians saw their former comrades in Ukraine free, thriving and growing ever closer to their fellow Europeans, they might end up wanting the same for themselves.
The fundamental shortcoming of Kinzer’s argument is that it allows for little agency to Ukrainians themselves, or the Russian leadership for that matter. In his introduction, he states that “nothing in this book seeks to deny their agency,” but he also refers to the country as “collateral damage” and “roadkill,” little more than “a tool,” “a crowbar,” “a battering ram against Russia.”
For Kinzer, most major political events in that part of the world can largely be explained as a reaction to American pressure. Echoing Kremlin propaganda, he asserts that the large-scale protest movement that toppled the Moscow-aligned president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 was “intensively promoted and guided” by U.S. officials.
In Donald Trump’s second term, Kinzer and his fellow restrainers are getting a taste for what scaling back U.S. involvement in the region could look like. Last month, the Trump administration reportedly threatened to cut off intelligence sharing and suspend weapons deliveries. Ukraine also lost access to a satellite system that its military uses for battlefield communication and drone operations.
Meanwhile, with no advance warning from American intelligence and a dwindling supply of interceptors, 600,000 Ukrainians were plunged into darkness as Russia launched barrage after barrage of ballistic missiles against the country’s energy infrastructure. As Ukraine’s sixth winter in war approaches, the only thing worse than U.S. meddling, it seems, is U.S. abandonment.
In a narrow sense, Kinzer’s overarching thesis is probably right: Were it not for American and European support for Kyiv over many years, Ukraine would likely not be at war with Russia today. Instead, it might resemble a large Belarus — a docile protectorate that is sovereign only in name, on good terms with Moscow at the cost of its own prosperity, dignity and freedom.
BOILING POINT: How America Brought War to Ukraine | By Stephen Kinzer | Holt | 369 pp. | $32.99
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