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The Kremlin claims the West broke a promise it made in the 1990s not to expand NATO, and is now using this claim to justify threats to invade Ukraine.
One of Russia’s consistent demands has been for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to stop expanding to the east and pledge never to include Kiev in the security alliance. But NATO has long insisted it has an open-door policy to any nation that meets its criteria for membership.
The United States and NATO dismissed Moscow’s security demands as nonstarters in a written response to the Kremlin delivered last week by the US ambassador to Russia.
While the current standoff between Russia and the West is based on many grievances, the narrative of Western betrayal has featured prominently in Moscow’s rhetoric for decades.
In a speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Vladimir Putin accused Western powers of violating a solemn pledge by considerably enlarging NATO – most notably with the Baltic countries joining the Alliance in 2004 – asking, “What happened to the assurances our Western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?”
NATO has not stopped expanding since the fall of the Soviet Union, growing from 17 countries in 1990 to 30 today, several of which were once part of the Soviet-led Warsaw pact.
The origin of the betrayal claim
To understand Russia’s claims of betrayal, it is necessary to review the reassurances then US secretary of state James A. Baker made to former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev during a meeting on February 9, 1990. In a discussion on the status of a reunited Germany, the two men agreed that NATO would not extend past the territory of East Germany, a promise repeated by NATO’s secretary general in a speech on May 17 that same year in Brussels.
Russia and the West finally struck an…
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Source : france24
