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Looks like Putin wants back to the 1990 deal that Gorbachev and President Bush made and that American presidents broke: that Nato wouldn’t expand an inch to the
by avgcorrection 5y ago
Looks like Putin wants back to the 1990 deal that Gorbachev and President Bush made and that American presidents broke: that Nato wouldn’t expand an inch to the east (to East Germany at the time).
His demands will obviously not be met. But is Nato even considering any concessions? You don’t have to accept the initial demand (it’s supposed to be a negotiation, after all).
- emptysongglass 5y ago"In 2014, the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev marked the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall by noting in an interview that Nato’s enlargement 'was not discussed at all' at the time: 'Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn’t bring it up, either.'" [1] [1] https://theconversation.com/ukraine-the-history-behind-russias-claim-that-nato-promised-not-to-expand-to-the-east-177085 https://theconversation.com/ukraine-the-history-behind-russi...
- avgcorrection 5y agoMaybe Gorbachev feels embarrassed that he didn’t get any formal guarantees from the West. In any case, declassified US, Soviet, German, British and French documents[1] show that multiple Western leaders assured Gorbachev himself that Soviet security concerns would not be threatened. And, of course, it was specifically Nato that was under discussion. [1] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017...