UPDATE:
The piece below allegorically refers to Russia’s military build-up along its border with Ukraine as “100,000 guns (and worse) [held] to Ukraine’s head…”
In fact, Russia has amassed approximately 130,000 troops on the Ukraine border, along with “troops, tanks and heavy artillery” and “had drawn up plans for a military operation involving up to 175,000 troops.” Russia has also “begun ferrying troops, armor, fighter jets and advanced antiaircraft systems into Belarus.”
This reported by the New York Times in “How Russia Has Increased Its Military Buildup Around Ukraine,” along with a detailed map of the positioning of such forces, virtually surrounding Ukraine.
Please view it HERE.
Original Post:
Although no one can divine the thought process of a ruthless, paranoid dictator, Vladimir Putin’s ongoing saber rattling at Ukraine’s borders has generally been framed as being the result of Putin’s belief that the expansion of the (NATO) alliance towards the East since the collapse of the Soviet Union represents a direct and intolerable existential threat to Russia’s security.
In particular, and with direct relevance to the ongoing crisis, Putin has unequivocally declared that Ukraine will not be allowed to become a member of NATO – not now, not ever.
Putin believes – or publicly states he believes – that the West has promised that NATO would not expand towards the motherland’s borders.
As recently as December 2021, during his annual press conference, Putin made it clear that, with respect to such a promise by the West, he had been wronged, had been “cheated.”
Answering a question on Ukraine and NATO expansion issues posed by British Moscow Sky News correspondent, Diana Magnay, Putin vented:
…our actions will not depend on the negotiation process, but rather on unconditional guarantees for Russia’s security today and in the historical perspective.
In this connection, we have made it clear that any further movement of NATO to the East is unacceptable…
We remember…how you promised us in the 1990s that [NATO] would not move an inch to the East. You cheated us shamelessly…
Did the West make such a promise?
Well, yes and no.
At the end of the Cold War, during negotiations between the West and Russia over unifying the two Germanys, West Germany’s foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher said in a Jan. 31, 1990 speech that there would not be “an expansion of NATO territory to the east, in other words, closer to the borders of the Soviet Union.”
In a New York Times piece, “In Ukraine Conflict, Putin Relies on a Promise That Ultimately Wasn’t,” Peter Baker writes that Genscher “was talking about whether NATO troops would be stationed in territory then constituting East Germany, not whether other countries would eventually be considered for membership in the alliance.”
“Picking up” on Genscher’s “formulation,” then-Secretary of State James A. Baker III told Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev less than two weeks later, “There would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east…” *
Back in Washington, the “clarifications” and damage control went into high gear. The term “jurisdiction” was ditched from all future discussions.
Peter Baker writes, “While there was indeed discussion between Mr. Baker and the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the months after the fall of the Berlin Wall about limiting NATO jurisdiction if East and West Germany were reunited, no such provision was included in the final treaty signed by the Americans, Europeans and Russians.”
Baker adds:
The final treaty unifying Germany later in 1990 barred foreign troops from the old East Germany, but German troops assigned to NATO could be deployed there once Soviet forces withdrew by the end of 1994. Nothing in the treaty addressed NATO expansion beyond that.
Mr. Gorbachev himself attested to this. Twenty-five years later he would say in an interview discussing foreign troops in Eastern Germany, “The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years… Baker’s statement [about not one inch to the east] was made in that context…Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done. And fulfilled.”
Historian, professor at Johns Hopkins University and research associate at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies, Mary Elise Sarotte, has written a book, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, documenting “the many arguments, myths, and crises that have arisen from this one utterance.”
In an excellent piece at the New Yorker, “In Ukraine Conflict, Putin Relies on a Promise That Ultimately Wasn’t,” Joshua Yaffa writes about Sarotte’s book: “Sarotte has the receipts, as it were: her authoritative tale draws on thousands of memos, letters, briefs, and other once secret documents—including many that have never been published before—which both fill in and complicate settled narratives on both sides.”
Included in Sarotte’s writings is how the Clinton Administration was able to “bribe” Yeltsin to “effectively allow unencumbered NATO enlargement” in exchange for a promise to “give Yeltsin four billion dollars in investment in 1997…while also dangling W.T.O. membership and other economic inducements.”
So, did the West promise “not an inch to the east”?
The answer may still be “Well, yes and no.”
However, it is not about those three (or four, or five) little words. It is not about NATO’s eastward march. It is all about the fetid, suffocating cloud of totalitarianism once again rolling westward. It is about one man trying to set freedom’s clock back by more than 30 years by holding more than 100,000 guns (and worse) to Ukraine’s head and, therefore, to the free world’s head.
Less dramatically, Seth G. Jones, puts it this way in a recent piece at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS):
In essence, this conflict is about whether 30 years after the demise of the Soviet Union, its former ethnic republics can live as independent, sovereign states or if they still must acknowledge Moscow as their de facto sovereign
Finally, there is the fact that in 1994, as part of the Budapest Memorandum, the United States “literally gave Ukraine assurances that it would be protected if Russia were to invade.”
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* A fascinating collection of now-declassified documents by the National Security Archive on “who promised what to whom on NATO expansion,” quotes James Baker telling Gorbachev, “We understand the need for assurances to the countries in the East. If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east.”
CODA:
The Sfera is the combat helmet worn by Russian special purpose troops. The official helmet of the Russian army is the 6B47.
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.