> NATO violated agreements with Russia not to expand towards Russia's borders over the past 20 years, and Russia's paranoia and aggression made this outcome predictable.
This is a persistent myth that is not reality, the soviet president at the time even says that no such promise was ever made.
> The Russians (Gorbachev himself had said this many times in interviews) that there was a promise from NATO to not expand eastwards because NATO was after all formed as a military alliance against Russia.
This oft repeated lie by supporters of Russia is getting tired. Gorbachev himself said that there was no promise given to him by NATO except in east Germany, which was kept.
> we promised Russia we wouldnt do an eastward expansion of nato, etc.
This is what Russia is promoting but it's a gross exaggeration. When the Berlin Wall fell, The Secretary of State at the time, James Baker, threw this out there to Gorbachev in early treaty talks as a "what if?", but others in US gov. said absolutely not, it never made it in the treaty, and Gorbachev never pushed for it. Gorbachev himself said that no promise or treaty was violated, but it was against the "spirit" of the assurances.
> No one promised that NATO will not expand, and it is not documented
Gorbachev, whose ambiguous statement about a feeling of betrayal when NATO did expand in the east beyond the reunited Germany is the source of the myth of the promise, later explicitly stated that no promise was made and the issue was never even brought up.
(And it's not as if the USSR and the USA didn’t understand the use of memorializing important agreements in writing to prevent later disputes about their scope and content.)
> it was the United States that broke the promise to not expand NATO after the fall of the Soviet Union
This promise is a myth [1]. At best, it was an informal statement by some guy in the U.S. government [2]. This has been blown out of proportion beyond any semblance to reality by Putin's propaganda.
And if it had happened, it would have been an agreement with the Soviet Union. Which does not exist. Russia, in 1994, formally agreed to "respect...Ukrainian independence and sovereignty in the existing borders" and "refrain from the threat or the use of force against...Ukraine," among other things. It has flagrantly broken these agreements.
> However, Gorbachev neither asked for nor was given any formal guarantees that there would be no further expansion of NATO beyond the territory of a united Germany.34 The issue was not even under discussion at NATO at the time, since the Warsaw Pact and the USSR were both still in existence. Even if the Warsaw Pact’s days were clearly numbered, there was no expectation in Western capitals in the autumn of 1990 that the USSR would collapse a year later.
> As early as December 1991, Russian President Boris Yeltsin wrote to NATO leaders saying that his country would join the Alliance some time in the future. Yeltsin’s successor Vladimir Putin, hinted during his first presidential term that Russia could become a full fledged member of the Atlantic Alliance.
> Bush Sr promised that NATO wouldn't expand into the former Soviet Union
No, he didn't. Gorbachev, one of whose vague comments later about feeling betrayed by NATO expansion into the East beyond united Germany is the origin of the myth, subsequently explicitly clarified that not only was no promise about NATO expansion made, but the issue was never even raised by the USSR.
> Russia can not accept Ukraine joining NATO.
Well, it should learn to accept that it's not the USSR any more and its sovereign neighbors have the right to make the security arrangements they choose.
> Oh, and lets stop starving Afghanistan while we're at it. The last time we screwed them over, Bin Laden came back at us.
Bin Laden didn't come at us for anything having to do with Afghanistan (where are policy benefited his interests), but because he was mad that his home country of Saudi Arabia turned to us rather than his network for defense when Iraq invaded Kuwait and threatened SA in 1990.
> I do feel a certain remorse since we've forsaken on our promise not to expand NATO towards the Russian border
No such promise was ever made, and even Gorbachev who started the myth by saying he felt tricked by the West when NATO expanded into former Warsaw Pact countries (beyond the United Germany where East Germany had been a Pact country) later specifically admitted that no promise was ever made and the issue of potential expansion beyond United Germany was never even discussed one way or the other.
> 1990. nato makes the not one inch eastward promise
Never happened. In fact, Russia and NATO have explicitly in writing (1997 treaty) that they respect the right of third parties to seek security as they see fit. Nor did Russia ever bring it up until Putin needed a justification for invading Georgia.
Even any notion of such talks is absurd, given that you place it a year before the USSR collapsed. Collapse of the USSR and parts of it applying for NATO (and eventually becoming members) was inconceivable at the time. As participants have recollected, the context of talks at the time was German reunification and stationing NATO forces in Eastern Germany. Nobody could imagine that the USSR itself would soon cease to exist.
This directly ties to another point:
> 2004. nato expands into ex-ussr, taking baltic states as members
(1) NATO didn't "expand", but those countries were hell-bent on seeking security to protect themselves from getting occupied ever again through cooperation in international organizations. That was set as a foreign policy goal in 1993.
(2) How did Putin react to that in 2004 when he met Schröder days after the Baltics became full members of NATO? He said that it's fine, never brought up any alleged promises. http://www.en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/30678
> In the same interview Putin said that if the US had not broken the promise to Gorbachev to not expand the NATO eastward
Gorbachev called that a myth in 2014 when Putin used it as an excuse to invade Crimea. USSR's minister of foreign affairs Shevardnadze and minister of defence Yazov have said the same thing. Source, excerpt from an interview to ZDF: https://twitter.com/Jesuitchild/status/1749887239226617873
This talking point is a shining example of propaganda. Gorbachev and Shevardnadze have gone as far as explaining why even in theory, such promise couldn't have been made. It's a complete fabrication.
> Or when U.S. Secretary of State James Baker famously promised that NATO would “not expand one inch eastward” of Germany?
You've fallen for Russian disinformation. This lie keeps getting spread around and corrected. Baker mentioned this to Gorbachev in preliminary talks for the treaty after the fall of the Berlin Wall, as a "what if? what concessions would the USSR then make?" It was then immediately struck down as an option by other US bureaucrats, never made it into the treaty, and Gorbachev never even mentioned it again until 2008 when he said US never promised this but expanding NATO into Baltics and such was against the "spirit" of the talks. One person, even a Secretary of State, spitballing ideas about what a treaty would look like is not even close to any sort of agreement between entire superpowers.
> The Soviets brokered a deal with us. We agreed NATO would not expand eastwards.
This is simply not true. It is a talking point developed for Putin's speech at 2007 Munich security conference to justify the shift to genocidal wars against its neighbors. It did not exist before 2007 and was not brought up when, for example, Poland joined NATO in 1999. There was an endless stream of whining and unspecified threats from Russian diplomats at the time, but not once do I remember talk about any deals.
It's nothing more than a simple, yet effective hook for catching western self-flagellants into their net, while the truth is that western governments went above and beyond to accommodate Russia and build cooperation, and it still lead to a maniacal dictatorship carrying out genocide in Europe and threatening rest of the world with hunger and nuclear armageddon.
> So it sounds like the myth is no myth and promises were made, but there were no legal guarantees given instead?
That, and the various "interventions" of the early 90s Russia. There is a reason why the Visegrad states (back-then Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary) were the first ones to literally beg NATO to allow them in - they were completely afraid of Russia after well over 100k people ending up dead in their neighborhood.
It was Russian aggression that drove the former Eastern Bloc countries to NATO.
> how we promised Russia we wouldnt do an eastward expansion of nato
This purported promise is a myth, see my comments here [1]. (TL; DR No treaty or public comments. Russia, on the other hand, signed a treaty promising not to invade Ukraine when she denuclearised. Talk of broken promises is a red herring.)
Russia has a realpolitik interest in creating buffer nations between it and the West. What it's doing--invading Crimea and now threatening to take the rest--doesn't further that goal. It does, however, serve Putin's political agenda.
>>> If NATO didn't insist on expanding after the fall of the Soviet Union (as promised by James Baker and others)
>Prominent members of Soviet leadership have explicitly denied that such subject ever came up. Nor did Russian representatives ever mention anything like it when most of Eastern Europe joined NATO in late 1990s and early 2000s.
>This conspiracy theory emerged in late 2000s
Some of us are actually old enough to have been adults when the Soviet Union fell and to have lived through that period of time. We were around to witness Baker promise that NATO would not expand "one inch Eastward" of Germany.
>You are not offering some nuanced alternative view, but reurgitating known proven lies
This is a comically bad effort to gaslight people who lived through the period and actually witnessed exactly what transpired. Unfortunately many younger people who weren't around to witness what actually happened, and many people who are uninformed and/or misinformed are easily misled by gaslighting like this.
> NATO continued to expand right up to Russia's doorstep
NATO was literally founded on the USSR's border ("Russia", as a top-level sovereign, did not exist), it had nothing to "expand up to", on either the Eastern or Western side.
> despite repeated promises not to
Assuming any such promises were made (which only one dubious alleged instance is ever pointed to, so hardly "repeatedly" in even the best case), they were personal guarantees between individual leaders of the USA and USSR, not durable binding commitments (note the absence of a treaty, executive agreement, public document or even mere joint contemporaneous oral statement of any kind) binding governments to their terms beyond the term of individual officials and heritable after the fall of one of the involved states by some successor regime.
And even had such an undocumented commitment existed and had validity, it was implicitly nullified by Russia's attempts to join NATO.
> Whether or not this is "NATOs fault", it's clear that the Ukraine invasion was motivated, in part, by NATO expansion.
It's not clear at all that it was. For one thing, Georgia was invaded immediately after NATO complied with the Russian request in 2008 not to extend Membership Action Plans to Georgia and Ukraine, and Ukraine subsequently abandoned efforts to join NATO until after Russia invaded and purported to annex much of the country in 2014. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been the cause of, rather than a response to, recent NATO expansion.
This is a persistent myth that is not reality, the soviet president at the time even says that no such promise was ever made.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2014/11/06/did-nato-...
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