Europeans seem to have had no idea that the United States has viewed the united Europe as a potential threat to it's global hegemoney for decades. As the Euro gained strength through the 1990s and reached parity with the dollar and Europe and Russia built stronger economic ties, the U.S. Government well understood what that could mean to their petro-dollar based domination of the global economy yet for the better part of a decade the EU stood by and did nothing while the US deliberately tried to upend the whole applecart by destabilizing Ukraine. The Pentagon poured billions of dollars and tons of military hardware into the neo-nazi thug elements of the Ukrainian military to facilitate their terror campaign of bombing and shelling the Russian speaking Ukranians in Eastern Ukraine while the CIA openly trained anti-Russian paramilitaries in covert/terrorist operations. At the same time they built bioweapons labs along the Russian border.
What does Europe think the ultimate goal of those operations was if it was not to make Russian-Ukranian relations untenable to the point where the military conflict we see today was inevitable? There was literally no other way to proceed. All of Russia's efforts to use the established forums of the United Nations to raise those issues were shut down by the NATO allies led by the U.S. This was all so obviously designed to destabilize Europe by igniting conflict backed by a massive anti-Russian propaganda campaign.
None of this happens today without the decades of US interference and meddling and case anyone did not realize, Brexit was all part of the same ongoing effort to destabilize Europe. The British people were completely duped into believing the mass immigration of millions of third world immigrants was a result of the UK's EU membership. That was completely false. Their Bilderberg puppet leaders were responsible for that. Especially Tony Blair. But they played the British people like a fiddle and had them believing the EU was their enemy. So along comes another Bilderberg puppet David Cameron handing them the way to damage the EU by voting to Brexit. All part of the US operations to destabilize Europe and of course once Britain voted Brexit, David Cameron did not even bother to keep up the pretense. He quit as the British Prime Minister and borded the first plane to the US.
Anyone with common sense should be able to see what the US has been doing. They feared the looming spectre of an EU and Russia building ever more complex ties, working together on economic projects and oil and gas pipelines that would have exposed the United States to the stark reality that when Europe and Russia and the surrounding nations of Asia and China no longer requires the U.S. extortion backed petro-dollar racket, the US economy collapses like the house of cards it is.
I know. They are blinded by the propaganda. Quite amazing really.