It’s not a fact at all. It is an extremely biased oversimplification and massive equivocation.

“Eastern Europe” is very broad, consisting of many countries. Within a country there are many viewpoints. Anyone can always be found to say “the initiative came” from them, whether it’s Communists in Cuba / Nicaragua / Vietnam whatever, or whether it’s literal fascists like Pinochet’s revolution in Chile, or the Houthi rebels in Yemen, or even the mujahideen in Afghanistan — where we similarly came to “help Afghanistan” in a proxy war that killed 2 million people over there! We did it all for the express purpose of “making the Soviets bleed for as long and as hard as possible” and “creating a Vietnam for them”, not out of any great love for Afghans!

The way proxy wars start, in fact, is that an outside actor emboldens one group in a country that foments a revolution, while another outside actor emboldens another group in the country that launches a counter-revolution. Whether it’s Maidan vs Anti-Maidan, or Houthis vs Saudi Loyalists, or even the Red Army vs the White Army in Russia, we know by now how a revolution can lead to destabilization and a destructive proxy war.

I have SHOWN you that the actual POPULATION of Ukraine was majority against NATO, for the very reasons given by everyone else — they didn’t want war with Russia and they chose economic and military ties with Russia over NATO. So why was Ukraine’s president working with NATO to get Ukraine into NATO?

So now you switched it to “Eastern Europe”. Wow, quite a big switch there, and certainly some other countries, like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania could be said to have had majorities who wanted to join NATO. In fact, that is what the 2001 article I linked to was about. It literally says:

Mr. Bush declared that he wanted NATO to expand up to Russia's border

Russia allowed this with no wars happening. But that was not enough. Soon afterwards it to be Ukraine and Georgia in NATO. It takes a special bias to look at a Reuters headline like

“Bush VOWS to PRESS for Ukraine, Georgia in NATO”

together with polls at the same time showing a solid majority of Ukrainians against it, and somehow conclude that Bush wasn’t pushing for Ukraine to be in NATO: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nato-ukraine-bush-idUSL01...

Everyone in Russia made it clear that this is an absolute red line, not just Putin. They did this for years, in every international forum. Every policy expert WARNED BUSH that this would be the consequence. To say it Russia’s reaction is “unprovoked” is just a total lie. The decision makers in the US simply ignored every single warning, and even now keep telling tons of people in their own government and other institutions to shut up and stop even so much as asking for a peace process. The reason is obvious: this is a push to hopefully surround Russia with members of a hostile alliance once and for all. Because otherwise Russia would be stronger with allies, and we’d rather their own beighbors fight them over there than we have to contend with a significant power with its own alliance on the global stage.