Back in 2008, William J. Burns warned that if Ukraine moved toward NATO, this would cause a civil war in Ukraine and that would then bring Moscow in. This might be exactly why Western officials subsequently enacted policies leading to such a result.
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1502177250300600320
Petro Poroshenko, Angela Merkel and François Hollande stated that Minsk II was never intended to bring peace and never intended to be fully implimented. Rather, they intended to delay war until Kievite regime was better prepared to fight one, all of three then simply might have intended the war to eventually come about.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/12/22/ffci-d22.html
Oleksii Arestovych predicted the war with remarkable accuracies and argued he wanted this to come about - Otherwise, Ukraine would later slip back into siding with Moscow by electing neutral president. This would follow that, if he saw such a war as the means to his ends, he will seek to bring that war about.
https://intellinews.com/former-ukrainian-presidential-advisor-perfectly-predicted-russian-invasion-in-2019-238183
A report was commissioned from RAND Corporation on ways to weaken Moscow and suggested provoking with Ukraine.
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_briefs/RB10000/RB10014/RAND_RB10014.pdf
During the high tension as Moscow and Kiev built forces up, in the week before invasion, Ukrainian army massively increased shelling of Donbass, as observed by the organization for security and co-operation in Europe. This looked like an offensive on Donbass would be launched, in such a period of tension that simply might have been intended to provoke Moscow in. No other credible reason to do this at that time but provocation.
https://www.osce.org/files/2022-02-22%20Daily%20Report_ENG.pdf
'Russiagate' was intended to facilitate public opinion in preperation for a war against Moscow - Similar to the growth of the invasion genre of literature in United Kingdom, prior to the great war.
