Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia is still peddling the old myth of Western betrayal of Russia by expanding NATO eastward after the end of the Cold War. Both Vladimir Putin and his Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov have used this myth to demand formal Western security guarantees and that NATO rules out future membership for Ukraine and other ex-Soviet republics. Kristina Spohr explains why this narrative is based on not only a misinterpretation of the treaty that reunified Germany, but also a misunderstanding of the diplomatic process that led to it.
The Kremlin under Putin finds the security order developed in Europe since the end of the Cold War unacceptable. Fundamental to this order is the principle (enshrined in the 1975 Helsinki Final Act) that each sovereign state
is free to choose its own alliances. Russia wants to create instead a buffer zone between itself and the West, thinning the US presence in Europe and once again dividing the continent into spheres of influence. Putin’s reasoning is straightforward enough: he has long viewed NATO enlargement as a threat. To bolster his case, he argues that the Alliance’s ‘open door’ policy is in direct contradiction to ‘Western assurances’ given to the Soviet leadership in 1990 and to Russia after 1991. He is wrong. No such assurances were ever made.
Putin’s myth of Western betrayal is not new. As early as 1993, his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, called NATO’s eastward expansion ‘illegal’. Four years later, Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov, a former adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev and head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, stated that several Western leaders had ‘told Gorbachev that not one country leaving the Warsaw Pact would enter NATO’. Ten years after that, at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, Putin complained: ‘what happened to the assurances given by our Western partners after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact’? During the annexation of Crimea in 2014, he again spoke of the ‘treason’ of 1990. Then, amid massive Russian troop deployment on Ukraine’s eastern border in December 2021, Putin claimed that NATO has ‘brazenly betrayed’ his country with ‘five waves of expansion’ against Russian interests.
‘Not one inch eastward’ – and what it really meant
Did NATO make a binding promise to refrain from eastward enlargement, only to make a clandestine volte-face?
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, German and Soviet leaders had to confront a number of complex problems, including what would happen to the 380,000 Red Army soldiers stationed in East Germany (GDR) and when and how the USSR would give up its Allied reserved rights over Germany. Eventually, Moscow agreed to withdraw its troops and to relinquish its rights as WWII victor power. As part of this negotiation, a unified Germany also gained full sovereignty. It was therefore free to choose its alliance affiliation, which resulted in it remaining a NATO member, even though it had grown in size.
In Putin’s narrative, Moscow only conceded on these issues because NATO had assured the Kremlin that it would not expand ‘one inch eastward’. US Secretary of State James Baker uttered these much-quoted words on 9 February 1990. (They were not, as is sometimes claimed, made by US President George H.W. Bush, who had ultimately responsibility for American policy.) Baker’s main aim was to allay Soviet fears of a larger, unified Germany by offering assurances that neither NATO command structures nor NATO troops would be transferred to the ‘territory of the former GDR’. Yet Baker’s ‘not one inch eastward’ formula would have made it impossible to apply NATO security guarantees (especially Article 5) to the whole of Germany. Bush therefore suggested to Chancellor Helmut Kohl that he should, in the future, speak of a ‘special military status’ for the GDR. A meeting in Camp David on 24/25 February 1990 confirmed this wording. Special provisions and obligations as regards the GDR territory were subsequently included in the text of the
Two Plus Four Treaty (under Articles 4 and 5), which formally re-established German unity. This treaty placed significant restrictions on the deployment of foreign NATO troops and nuclear weapons on East German soil. In return for his willingness to compromise on these points, Kohl granted Gorbachev, in bilateral talks, a financial package totalling around DM 100 billion, in the form of loans and economic aid, which financed the withdrawal of the Red Army soldiers.
To be clear, then, the talks in February 1990 were never about NATO expansion into Eastern Europe. They were confined to the specific issue of NATO’s defence in the wake of German unification – and the two issues should not be conflated. It is also important to remember that the Warsaw Pact was still in existence during these talks, so NATO enlargement was a moot point.