Ukraine’s constitution commits the nation to staying out of alliances. From Ted Snider at antiwar.com:
In 2007, Putin asked the world, “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.” He then went on to remind his audience of NATO’s promise not to expand east of Germany toward Russia’s borders.
In 2008, when NATO promised that Ukraine would become a member of NATO, Russian officials warned that “Ukraine’s membership in the alliance is a huge strategic mistake which would have most serious consequences for pan-European security.” Putin said that “if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the eastern regions. It will simply fall apart.” Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov warned that Russia would do “everything possible” to prevent Ukraine from becoming a member of NATO.
In 2023, Putin said that “In fact, the threat of Ukraine’s accession to NATO is the reason, or rather one of the reasons for the special military operation.”
It is often forgotten in the discussion of the war in Ukraine that in 1990 and 1991, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the break up of the Warsaw Pact and the end of the Cold War, NATO promised Gorbachev that NATO would not expand east. With the declassification of so many of the documents recording those promises, no objective analyst can any longer deny that the promise was made. Rather, apologists for US and NATO behavior claim that the promise was not binding because it was not written down. But, as several scholars, like Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson and Mark Trachtenberg, have pointed out, verbal agreements made at the level this verbal agreement was made can be binding under international law, and they cite several important precedents, including precedence involving the US and the Soviet Union.
