The origin of the myth dates back to the last days of the Cold War, and that the United States allegedly promised Moscow not to expand the NATO alliance eastward. President Vladimir Putin stubbornly claimed that Moscow received assurances from the United States in the 1990s that NATO would not develop in Eastern Europe. The alleged guarantee was provided by James Baker, then Bush’s senior secretary of state, while the superpowers discussed the reunification of East and West Germany.

Putin believes this alleged broken promise is the real cause of the escalating Ukrainian conflict in Europe. Moscow has set a number of conditions to prevent a possible invasion of Ukraine, including a condition that NATO must swear that Ukraine will not join the alliance.

– Is the claim that the United States has promised Moscow not to expand the NATO alliance to the east, is it myth or truth?

– There’s a lot of debate around this. It is said that James Baker (then US Secretary of State), while negotiating German reunification in 1990, made some sort of statement that NATO should not expand eastward. This was confirmed in many ways by Mikhail Gorbachev (the last leader of the Soviet Union). But this is in the context of German reunification, Russian security policy expert and senior researcher at NUPI, Jakub M. Godzimirski, told Nettavisen.

– When Putin uses this argument, he can prove it a bit with sources. But at the same time, there is little evidence to say it was a deal. What is quite clear is that no binding agreement has been made on this matter, Godzimirski said.

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– Silly argument

Baker himself later admitted that the limit to NATO’s expansion eastward was the ability to speak up when he and Gorbachev negotiated German reunification in the period following the fall of the Berlin Wall. But no binding treaty was ever incorporated into the final treaty between America, Russia and Europe.

“In the end, this is a ridiculous argument,” Baker said in an interview shortly after Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014.

– It is true that I initially said in the negotiations “how”, and then Gorbachev himself supported a solution that expanded the borders to include the German Democratic Republic (East Germany / GDR), Baker said in the interview.

Russia, for its part, appears to have violated previous agreements reached in the 1990s. In 1994, Russia, Britain, and the United States signed the so-called Budapest Memorandum, in which Russia pledged to “respect Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and existing borders.” At the same time, Ukraine gave up 1,900 nuclear warheads in exchange for these guarantees from Moscow. Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014 was a clear violation of this treaty.

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– American historian Mary Elise Sarotte wrote an article about this promise not to expand NATO to the east. It received a lot of attention and was based on a thorough analysis of documents and minutes from conversations between these leaders. He concluded that Russia could interpret it as meaning that NATO would not expand eastward. But at the same time, it could be argued that these talks took place in 1990, and the situation has changed drastically since then, says Godzimirski.

– The Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact crumbled, and among these post-Soviet countries, only Russia and Belarus expressed concern about the expansion of NATO. The Baltic states, for their part, are very enthusiastic about this expansion, Godzimirski said.

Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania were all accepted as members of NATO in 2004.

Unclear words

The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 sparked extensive negotiations to reunite East and West Germany which had been divided after World War II.

At that time, the Bush administration (senior) was determined to incorporate a unified Germany into NATO. Other Western voices, however, were concerned with calming the Soviet Union’s concerns for their own security. On January 31, 1990, then-West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher was wronged by saying that there would be no “expansion of NATO territory in the east”, wrote The New York Times.

Genscher, however, was talking about whether NATO troops should be deployed in the region that later formed East Germany, and not about whether Eastern Bloc countries should eventually be considered members of the alliance. However, these words were rejected by West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

Baker had similar words when he visited Moscow on February 9, just days after Genscher’s remarks.

According to the released documents, Baker gave Moscow multiple guarantees that “Nato jurisdiction or forces will not move east.”

“There will be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction over NATO forces one millimeter to the east,” Baker told Gorbachev at the time.

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But in Washington, these words received the attention of the National Security Council, because the word “jurisdiction” could indicate that the NATO collective defense alliance would only apply to parts of Germany.

“The US National Security Council quickly contacted him (Baker’s editor’s note) and said these words could be misunderstood,” Condoleezza Rice said later in a book about James Baker.

Rice later became President Bush’s senior Soviet adviser. Baker took the signal and dropped the word “jurisdiction” in further negotiations.