the United States, European Union and NATO remained blithely unmindful of the consequences 
 when they kept pushing as Russia gained sufficient power to resist incursions into its areas of crucial national interest. 
 What were the leaders of these Western entities thinking?

Pfaff puts that question a little differently: 
“Why Should Slavic and Orthodox-Uniate Ukraine, its history painfully intertwined with Russia’s, 
be made a member of what was and still essentially is Charlemagne’s post–Roman Europe?” 
With one sentence he places today’s sordid events surrounding Ukraine into a broad historical perspective of more than a millennium.