Not that long ago, NATO Deputy Secretary General Alexander Verbshow posted a message on his Twitter account saying that NATO had not given any promises or guarantees to the Soviet administration not to expand to the east. According to Vershbow, NATO has not broken any promises.
You may have read a lot about secret agreements between the Soviet Union and the North Atlantic Alliance. Under those agreements, the USSR was supposed to remove the Berlin Wall while NATO undertook not to increase its military power.
Noteworthy, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US historian Peter Kuznick are sure that there was such an exchange of promises. Today, however, NATO officials had forgotten about those agreements because the alliance profits a lot from the concept of Russian aggression.
In fact, this concept justifies the fact of NATO's existence. As experience shows, the alliance is unable to handle any global threat, such as terrorist threats and threats to national security of European countries. At the same time, NATO works very well to achieve other goals. Particularly, the alliance maintains aggressive stand-off with the empire of evil in the face of Russia. The North Atlantic Alliance has also been expanding to the east very successfully.
In the east, NATO approached the Baltic States that border on Russia, so the alliance could not go further. Ukraine wants to become another member of the alliance, but this country looks so miserable that Western organisations prefer not to have such a member in their ranks.
"Many people misleadingly believe that NATO officials promised Mikhail Gorbachev not to expand the alliance to the east and then broke those promises. This is not true the fact. At that point of history, the countries that were joining NATO could not even be considered as possible members of the alliance, because some of those countries were members of the Warsaw Pact," Pavel Palazhchenko, a man who was known to be Mikhail Gorbachev's right hand, said an an exclusive interview with politonline.ru.
Palazhchenko, who currently chairs the department for international media relations of the Gorbachev Fund, said that the USSR and the Federative Republic of Germany signed an agreement, under which the FRG undertook to reduce its military contingent and exclude the deployment of weapons of mass destruction on the territory of the former German Democratic Republic.
According to him, the London declaration said that NATO was becoming political, rather than a military bloc. It was also a violation in connection with NATO's eastward expansion.
"As for the states that became NATO members, including Warsaw Pact countires, one should recollect that the question of such and opportunity was asked during the press conference of Boris Yeltsin and Lech Walesa. During the press conference, Russia's first president was asked if that could be possible and how Russia would react to such a development. Yeltsin said at first that it was a sovereign right of every country. Afterwards, upon his return to Moscow, Yeltsin wrote a letter to foreign leaders about the inadmissibility for such an expansion, but it was impossible to stop the process alredy," Gorbachev's former associate Palazhchenko said.
The demolition of the Berlin Wall was an unprecedented move of humanism on the part of the USSR. The Soviet Union believed that Germany had completely eliminated the remains of fascist ideology. The Soviet leadership was convinced that they could forgive Germany and give the German nation a chance to independently choose their historical path. The USA, though, continued to keep all of Germany as its protectorate.
Thus, the Soviet Union demonstrated both humanism and humanity in the last years of its history. What did the West do in return taking into consideration the fact that Western countries have been trumpeting about the values of humanism for the last 200 years? The West did nothing and simply wound everyone around its finger. In return to the decision of the USSR, the NATO administration was supposed to stop the process of expansion legally.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO lost its prime enemy. The alliance had no one to wage war with. The Russian Federation was lying in ruins. However, NATO continued the expansion to close economic, political and military pincers on Russia. Apparently, the European and American theory of humanism contains an unwritten rule: the enemy must be finished off with.
This is exactly what NATO was doing. During the recent years, the rhetoric from NATO officials was growing tougher. In addition to "we-did-not-promise-anything" statements, NATO officials accuse Russia of putting obstacles for NATO's expansion to the east.
"Russia is using every opportunity to divide the NATO alliance, ... The intent is to create a situation where NATO can't continue to thrive," US General Joseph Votel said.
The problem is not about the promises. The main question is: who is the aggressor and who wants war with every fibre of their being?
This "someone" is not Russia at all.
On the pages of Foxtrot Alpha, US military expert Tyler Rogoway "sentenced" the United States and NATO to destruction in case of a non-nuclear war with Russia. He acknowledged that Russia had fallen to the bottom during the 90s to rise again. Today, Rogoway believes, the country is capable of defending its borders, opening several fronts in different directions and waging hybrid wars. All this, he said, makes Moscow invincible for NATO.