After weeks of talks between Russian and Western diplomats over
Moscow’s proposed security guarantees, designed to limit NATO expansion
and reduce tension in Europe, documents leaked to Spanish newspaper El
Pais have revealed the bloc’s long-awaited response. Amid an ongoing
standoff over Ukraine, representatives from Washington and NATO have
proposed several measures for de-escalation, including increased
transparency about each side’s military plans. The core of the letter,
however, was a resounding, if unsurprising, rejection of Moscow’s
central request to prohibit the expansion of the US-led military bloc
into Ukraine and Georgia.
Russia’s arguments that NATO’s growth should be limited rest partly
on promises that President
Vladimir Putin says the West made in the
1990s, assuring Soviet and then Russian negotiators that the
organization would not seek to add new member states further east.
Western leaders insist that no such guarantees were made,
and last month, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken commented,
“I think the charitable interpretation would be that sometimes we and Russia have different interpretations of history.”
Did the West break promises about NATO expansion? And why is the issue so important to Putin today?
How has NATO evolved? The North Atlantic Treaty Organization grew out of British and
American efforts in the wake of World War II to build an alliance that
would contain the Soviet Union and combat the spread of communism in
Europe. After West Germany joined the faction in 1955, bringing the
total number of members to 15, the USSR formed the Warsaw Pact with
seven other Eastern Bloc states. The two sides fought ideological
battles and proxy wars for the duration of the Cold War, but there was
never any direct military confrontation between them.
After the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and dissolution of the Soviet
Union in 1991, NATO was left with the task of re-evaluating its purpose
and priorities. This was the decade when the alliance made its first
military operations, including intervening in the wars that erupted in
the former Yugoslavia as the federation broke up into separate states.
At the same time, the bloc sought friendly relations with the newly
autonomous nations of Central and Eastern Europe.
The first post-Cold War expansion of NATO happened in 1990, when the
formerly communist East Germany reunified with West Germany, which was
already a member of the alliance. In 1997, the organization invited
former Eastern Bloc states Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to
join, amid much internal debate and opposition from Russia. Since then,
11 more countries have been inducted, including Lithuania, Latvia, and
Estonia, the Baltic states that had previously been part of the USSR.
At the Bucharest Summit in 2008, the bloc made an announcement that
Georgia and Ukraine, also former Soviet Republics, would someday join.
However, the two countries were not offered formal paths to membership,
and with Russia strongly opposed, their potential induction into NATO
remains a pressing question with far-reaching consequences for security
in Europe today.
Were promises broken? At an end-of-year press conference in December, Putin asked the US to “remember,
as I have mentioned many times before and as you know very well, how
you promised us in the 1990s that [NATO] would not move an inch to the
east. You cheated us shamelessly.”
The Russian leader was referring to a statement that former American
Secretary of State James Baker made in 1990, when he proposed to
then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO wouldn’t move “one inch” to
the east if the USSR would agree to German reunification. Putin and
others have pointed to the phrase as proof of how Russia was misled by
Washington during and after the fall of the Soviet Union, and as a
justification for Russia’s current demand that it be provided written
guarantees limiting the Western bloc’s expansion.
NATO writes on its website that no such agreement was ever made, and cites a 2014 interview with Gorbachev in which he says, “the
topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t
brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility.” In the same interview, however, Gorbachev goes on to say, “the
decision for the US and its allies to expand NATO into the east was
decisively made in 1993. I called this a big mistake from the very
beginning. It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements
and assurances made to us in 1990.”
In 2017, the National Security Archive in Washington shared
declassified documents showing that Baker’s famous statement was one of
many assurances Western officials made to Soviet leaders.
The Archive writes, “the documents show that multiple national
leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European
membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions
of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were
not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and
that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about
NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and
telcons at the highest levels.”
The Archive released another trove of documents in 2018, showing that
Russian Federation officials were told in the 1990s that the country
would be included in a future pan-European security structure, and that
Moscow had consistently objected to NATO expansion as threatening to its
national security interests.
According to the Archive, US Secretary of State Warren Christopher
told Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1993 that the Partnership for
Peace program, which American President Bill Clinton later described as “a track that will lead to NATO membership,” was about “including
Russia together with all European countries, not creating a new
membership list of just some European countries for NATO,” to which Yeltsin reportedly responded, “this is genius!” However,
American diplomats’ accounts of the meeting suggest that the Russian
leader did not listen to hints that the Partnership for Peace would lead
to enlargement, and quote Christopher as telling Yeltsin that the US
would be “looking at the question of membership as a longer term eventuality.”
Gorbachev eventually agreed to German reunification, and there was
never an official treaty limiting NATO’s enlargement. As historian Mary
Elise Sarotte writes, Baker and his aides “would point to the
hypothetical phrasing and lack of any written agreement afterward as a
sign that the secretary had only been test-driving one potential option
of many.” But on the Russian side, “there’s still this residual bitterness afterwards,” Sarotte explained to NPR last week.
Despite disagreements over the exact nature of the decades-old talks,
to Vladimir Putin, the West’s conduct and NATO’s subsequent movement
east represent a betrayal and an ongoing threat to Russia.
What are the stakes today? For months now, the US and other Western nations have been voicing
fears that Russia could be planning an imminent invasion of Ukraine, and
have threatened massive economic sanctions in the event of an attack.
Moscow has consistently denied aggressive intentions, but Putin and
other Russian leaders have said they could take unspecified “military-technical measures” if their security concerns are not met.
Washington and NATO have already rejected the idea of a formal limit
on the bloc’s growth. Last week, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told
reporters that it “will not compromise” on potential enlargement into Ukraine or Georgia, and maintained that “NATO is a defensive alliance and we do not seek confrontation.”
Stoltenberg and other representatives of the bloc frequently refer to its “open door policy” and
say that Russia should not have a veto over mutual agreements between
NATO and other countries. According to the organization’s founding
document, membership is open to any “European state in a position to
further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security
of the North Atlantic area.”
Ukraine and Georgia’s inductions are not on the table anytime in the
near future, but the two nations’ leaders hold out hope that the promise
made in 2008 will someday be fulfilled. Many in those countries contend
that being a part of NATO would protect them against the threat of
future aggression, and Kiev cites Moscow’s actions in Crimea in 2014 as
evidence that it covets Ukrainian territory. That year, after the
ousting of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych during mass street
protests, which turned violent in places, Moscow sent soldiers to the
peninsula and subsequently incorporated the territory into Russia
following a public vote. Ukraine, and most other countries, consider the
poll illegitimate due to the military presence, and Kiev refers to
Crimea as a “temporarily occupied territory.” Putin has defended the referendum and said that the Crimean people exercised their right to self-determination.
Moscow has indicated that it considers NATO membership for Ukraine
and Georgia, both of which share long borders with Russia, as a “red line.” In
addition to seeing the 1990s talks as evidence of Western deception,
Russian leaders also point to the 1999 OSCE Charter for European
Security, which says that each country “has an equal right to security” and that nations “will not strengthen their security at the expense of the security of other states.” Officials
have argued that this means NATO and the US cannot expand their
military infrastructure eastward without Russia’s consent.
In a TV appearance last week, Moscow’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that it was “difficult”
to see NATO as a defensive alliance in light of its interventions in
Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya. On Wednesday, Kremlin Press
Secretary Dmitry Peskov told journalists that Putin continues to be
concerned about past deceptions by the West, and claimed, “hypothetically, in the future, foreseeable or far-off, we could see Ukraine as a NATO member attacking us.”
“Then, we would face the threat of a war between Russia and the NATO bloc,” Peskov warned.
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