This is an important question, because if assurances were given, one can understand Russia’s fear of an expanding NATO and its angry determination to do something about it. From Ted Snider at libertarianinstitute.org:
At the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, eventual membership in NATO was promised to Ukraine and Georgia with the statement that “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agree today that these countries will become members of NATO.” Russian President Vladimir Putin “flew into a rage,” and, according to a Russian journalist quoted by John Mearsheimer, warned that “if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the eastern regions. It will simply fall apart.”
A decade and a half later, Putin sent the message to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: “Tell me you’re not joining NATO, I won’t invade.”
Putin is consistently accused in the West of dangerous melodrama and of historical revisionism when he points to NATO’s broken promise that it wouldn’t expand east if the Soviet Union permitted a united Germany to join NATO.
In 2007, Putin complained, “What happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.” A year later, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev complained that the United States “promised that NATO wouldn’t move beyond the boundaries of Germany after the Cold War but now half of central and Eastern Europe are members, so what happened to their promises? It shows they cannot be trusted.”
Then U.S. Secretary of State James Baker has claimed that the discussion of NATO expansion applied only to East Germany, not to Eastern Europe: “There was never any discussion of anything but the GDR (East Germany].” A 2014 NATO report claimed, “No such pledge was made, and no evidence to back up Russia’s claims has ever been produced.”
But declassified documents now reveal that NATO was lying, and that it is Baker, and not Putin, who was engaging in historical revisionism.
