When the Soviet Union disintegrated, Russia inherited its "one-vote veto" status on the UN Security Council, as well as most of the Soviet territory, overseas assets and debts. At the same time, Russia was also left with the great power and historical leanings of the former state, as well as the promises, grievances and hatreds surrounding the dissolution.

Among these, NATO's eastward expansion may have been the most jolting for Russia.

In the eyes of President Vladimir Putin and other Russian political elites, the West has reneged on promises made before the Soviet Union's disintegration. Instead, it has, for the past three decades, continually been hemming in Russia's strategic security space. This is not only a result of U.S. and NATO arrogance, but also marks a betrayal Russia can never accept.

'Brazen trick'

"'Not one inch to the east,' they told us in the 90s. So what? They cheated, just brazenly tricked us! Five waves of NATO expansion and now already, please, the systems are appearing in Romania and Poland," Putin remarked at his annual press conference on December 23, 2021.

Earlier the same day, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg gave a speech claiming that the alliance never made any promises not to expand, particularly to the east.

In a crucial meeting on February 10, 1990, between West German leader Helmut Kohl and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, it was agreed that the Soviets would assent in principle to German unification in NATO, as long as NATO did not expand to the east.

Then U.S. Secretary of State James Baker made his famous "Not one inch to the east" assurance regarding NATO's expansion during his meeting with Gorbachev on February 9, 1990. "Not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well, it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO's present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction," he said.

If it were not for the subsequent expansion of NATO all the way to the east, the current crisis in Ukraine would unlikely be occurring. But unfortunately, the "brazen trick" of "Not one inch to the east" has already knocked down the first domino.

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russia held high hopes for the West. Early Russian leaders, such as former President Boris Yeltsin, believed that the West would embrace Russia after the country abandoned its previous ideology.

Russia seemed to have turned itself from the "Evil Red Empire" in the eyes of the West into a power on par with the U.S., the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan, when it was invited to join the Group of Seven (G7) Summit in 1991. And the G7 was expanded to the Group of Eight.

At that time, there was a belief among Russians, from leadership to general public, that a happy, fairytale-like life was to follow soon. Russia still held on to these illusions about the West even after the latter was indifferent to its economic woes in the 1990s.

In March 2000, then presidential candidate Putin said in an interview that Russia would possibly join NATO, on condition that "Russia's interests are going to be taken into account, if Russia becomes a full-fledged partner." Observers believed that Russia was sincere and saw the move as a diplomatic gesture to the West at that time.

Putin had close contacts with some of NATO's leaders in the early days of his term, including former U.S. President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Putin even accompanied Blair to watch an operatic performance of War and Peace when the latter visited St. Petersburg in March 2000.

Soured ties

Nonetheless, the improving personal relationships between Putin and Western leaders seemed not to diminish but rather to worsen the geostrategic crisis faced by Russia. During the three decades between 1991 and 2021, NATO accepted 10 former Warsaw Pact countries as its members and, through this eastward expansion, made a strategic move to encircle Russia that stretched over 3,000 km from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south.

The international community believes that Putin started to doubt the West in 2002, when NATO leaders admitted seven countries, including Baltic ones (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), to the alliance—despite Russia's objection.

The speech Putin delivered at the Munich Security Conference in Germany on February 10, 2007, was widely regarded as a call to abandon long-held illusions and break with the West. He harshly criticized America's foreign policy and its idea of creating a unipolar world order, and strongly opposed NATO's expansion and its plan to deploy a U.S. anti-missile system in Eastern Europe.

"I think it is obvious that NATO's expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust," Putin stressed in his speech.

On February 10, marking the 15th anniversary of Putin's speech in Munich, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said what is happening now "once again underlines the rightness of President Putin."

A tool against Russia?

After the deterioration of its relations with Russia in 2014, Ukraine accelerated the process of joining NATO, and even tabled a constitutional amendment bill in 2019 to make its NATO accession a national "strategic mission," drawing it even closer to Russia's security bottom line.

Analysts pointed out that since 2014, Putin's stance on Ukraine has always been very clear: Ukraine must not join NATO.

In July 2021, Putin again stated in his article On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians that Russia is open to a dialogue with Ukraine and is ready to discuss the most difficult of issues. "But it is important for us to understand that our partner is defending its national interests, not serving someone else's; and is not a tool in someone else's hands to fight against us," Putin said.

If there has been a whistleblower in the current crisis, it has been Putin since 2007, but both the U.S. and NATO have ignored the sharp, even piercing, warning.

In June 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden and Putin met in Geneva, Switzerland, where Putin raised the issues of NATO's expansion and Ukraine's membership of the alliance. However, Biden again displayed a de rigueur kind of Western arrogance and indifference that has come to be expected, and did not respond directly to Putin's concerns.

By late October 2021, Russia began to exert extreme pressure on Ukraine and the Western bloc behind it with a heavy military presence along the border between the two countries; in December, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs took the unusual step of publishing a draft Agreement on Measures to Ensure the Security of the Russian Federation and Member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization which encapsulated Russia's desired guarantees. Among them, Russia's bottom line: the exclusion of the possibility of further expansion of NATO and Ukraine's accession to it.

However, the U.S. and other NATO members have rhetorically criticized the draft treaty from the point of view of Ukraine's right to apply.

This document can be seen as Russia's offer to the West to seek a package solution to security issues, and there are several points of compromise and concessions, but Russia has no way back on the Ukraine issue.

Ukraine needs security guarantees, as does Russia. As the Ukraine crisis comes to a head, the U.S. and NATO cannot and should not lash out at Russia without reflecting on their longstanding prejudice. 

This is an edited excerpt of an article published by Global Times

Copyedited by G.P. Wilson

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