An opinion piece written by commentator and freelance journalist Melanie Phillips on her substack contests President Vladimir Putin’s justification for the invasion of Ukraine.
Putin at the Munich security conference in 2007 quoted NATO General Secretary Mr Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990: ‘The fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee’.
Stephen Pifer, a deputy director at the State Department’s Soviet desk in 1990, in a 2014 article for Brookings said what actually happened:
‘Western leaders never pledged not to enlarge NATO, a point that several analysts have demonstrated. Mark Kramer explored the question in detail in a 2009 article in the Washington Quarterly. He drew on declassified American, German and Soviet records to make his case. and noted that in discussions on German reunification in the two-plus-four format (the two Germanys plus the United States, Soviet Union, Britain and France), the Soviets never raised the question of NATO enlargement other than how it might apply in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR).
‘What the Germans, Americans, British and French did agree to in 1990 was that there would be no deployment of non-German NATO forces on the territory of the former GDR. I was a deputy director on the State Department’s Soviet desk at the time, and that was certainly the point of Secretary James Baker’s discussions with Gorbachev and his foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze. In 1990, few gave the possibility of a broader NATO enlargement to the east any serious thought…’
‘When one reads the full text of the Woerner speech cited by Putin, it is clear that the secretary general’s comments referred to NATO forces in eastern Germany, not a broader commitment not to enlarge the Alliance.’
Pifer says that Russia behind the Headlines published an interview with Mikhail Gorbachev, who was Soviet president during the negotiations concerning German reunification. Gorbachev was asked why he did not ‘insist that the promises made to you — particularly US Secretary of State James Baker’s promise that NATO would not expand into the East — be legally encoded?’
Gorbachev replied: ‘The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. … Another issue we brought up was discussed: making sure that NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification. Baker’s statement was made in that context… Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done. And fulfilled.’