Ukraine crisis: how Putin feeds off anger over Nato’s eastward expansion

Russian president's attention-seeking diplomatic demands speak to long-held grievances

It is more than 13 years since Nato's Bucharest summit, the meeting that agreed that the western alliance wanted the former Soviet states of Ukraine and Georgia to become members. But in many respects the legacy of that April 2008 meeting - the last attended by Vladimir Putin - hangs over the Ukraine crisis today.

George W Bush arrived in an expansionist, post-cold war mindset pushing for Ukraine and Georgia to be given a roadmap to Nato membership. Granting them a so-called membership action plan would allow the two countries to follow a string of former eastern bloc states that had been allowed to join since 1999.