At their landmark summit in 2008, held in Bucharest, Romania, the leaders of NATO declared that both Ukraine and Georgia would join one day, but they gave no timeline and offered no specific plan for keeping that promise. NATOs non-decision on their membership was the worst possible outcome, the Harvard historian Serhiy Plokhy writes in his new book, The Russo-Ukrainian War. It angered the Kremlin without offering any protection to Ukraine and Georgia. While Russia would not dare to attack NATO, it could easily attack its aspirants, Plokhy wrote, and it did so. A few months after the Bucharest summit, Russia invaded Georgia and occupied about a fifth of its territory.

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