When you’re dealing with American politicians and bureaucrats you’d better get it in writing, and even then they may try to cheat you. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:
With all eyes on the situation unfolding at the Ukraine border – as separatists in Donbas reporting intensified shelling amid a “general mobilization” of military-age males – Germany’s left-leaning Spiegel asks a question fundamental to the entire conflict…
“Vladimir Putin insists that the West cheated Russia by expanding NATO eastward following the end of the Cold War. Is there anything to his claims? The short answer: It’s complicated.“
The essence of the argument is this; In September 1993, Russian President Boris Yeltsin penned a long letter to US President Bill Clinton, which railed against the eastward expansion of NATO at a time when Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were interested in joining the organization. Yeltsin argued that the Russian public saw this “as a sort of neo-isolation” of Russia, and that the “Two Plus Four Treaty” linked to Germany’s 1990 reunification “precludes the option of expanding the NATO zone into the East.”
As Spiegel writes, “There is essentially no other historical issue that has poisoned relations between Moscow and the West as much in the last three decades as the disagreement over what, precisely, was agreed to in 1990.”
Since the 1990 letter, NATO has accepted 14 countries in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, which the Kremlin has complained of haaving been duped every step of the way.”
According to current Russian President Vladimir Putin, “You cheated us shamelessly.”
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 
We would not tolerate this happening on our doorstep. Why do we insist they do?
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