WELL DONE VLAD, YOU'VE BECOME NATO'S GREATEST ASSET

Putin argued that he couldn't accept the threat of NATO on Russia's borders if Ukraine became a member, but the result of his catastrophic miscalculation is that NATO's border with Russia has actually doubled in length.

- JOHN DOBSON

How things change. Just five years ago, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the military alliance of the United States, Canada and Europe that had deterred Soviet and Russian aggression for 70 years, was close to dissolution. According to a report in the New York Times, the self-proclaimed "very stable genius" President Donald Trump repeatedly said throughout 2018 that he wanted to withdraw from NATO. In the days around a tumultuous NATO summit in the summer of 2018, Trump told his national security officials that he didn't see the point of the military alliance, which he considered a drain on the United States' budget. Without the US, NATO could not survive. At the time there was growing concern in the democratic world about Donald Trump's efforts to keep his meetings with Vladimir Putin secret from even his own aides. So Trump's real motives were deeply suspicious. Today NATO is flourishing, all thanks to President Vladimir Putin. Although the reasons for Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine are unclear, Moscow's narrative on the reason for the war changes from day to day, Kremlin apologists and those sympathetic to Moscow argue that he had to invade Ukraine to stop it becoming a member of NATO. In the real world there was, of course, no imminent possibility of this happening, although Kyiv had repeatedly requested membership since Russian forces annexed Crimea in 2014. It was this invasion that shifted public opinion. Polling in 2012 showed that less than 20 percent of Ukrainians wanted to join NATO. Unsurprisingly, a poll conducted in December 2016, two years after the annexation, revealed that this had risen to 71 percent. At a time when 98 percent of Ukrainians hate Putin and Russia, it's hard to recall that in the years up to 2014 Putin's popularity throughout Ukraine was consistent at about 50 percent, according to Gallup. Following the annexation, this fell to less than 5 percent and now close to zero, even among ethnic R