This is very interesting and I read through many of the source materials. And it appears the situation is far more complicated than what the Washington Post suggests. The argument Russians have been making have far greater weight than I thought, but it appears there is still significant disagreement among scholars about the extent of these assurances though, and I think a big part of this is the context in which these discussions took place (the Soviet Union had not yet collapsed).
I think what is far more important are the discussions with Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, because to the extent assurances were made, I find it less persuasive that the West somehow betrayed present-day Russia, because these assurances were made to a government that no longer exists. I think our conversations with present-day Russia are far more important.
Read this article:
Surely the Kremlin watched with no small amount of bitterness last Friday as NATO’s heads of state and government gathered for dinner at Warsaw’s
warontherocks.com
Thanks for the link. I read all of it. I think it's in line with
Gorbachev-centered and then
Yeltsin-centered links I had mentioned as well.
I disagree with "these assurances were made to a government that no longer exists" approach, as I believe Russia and West both see Russia effectively inheriting all agreements made with Soviet Union. For example,
Russia had assumed and after ~25 years paid off all foreign debt from the Soviet Union. It would have been much easier to just say, 'Oh sorry, new country now...' (which is what USSR did with pre-communist Tsarist debts), or even 'We'll pay a part of that and other 14 former USSR Republics should pay their fair share'. And it's not just debt. Nuclear related agreements and all other kinds of cooperation was proceeding under assumption of Russia taking over exactly where USSR left it.
In any case, as both your and my links showcase, Yeltsin, let alone most of the other Russian officials from both left and right, DID always want to have NATO NOT expand East. They could not do much about it though, and the West at worst misled and at best sugar-coated this expansion. Either way, both Gorbachev and Yeltsin came to believe NATO was
not going to expand (and later, was not going to expand
any time soon) and were upset when the opposite happened. Putin decided he can do more than just stand by and watch Georgia and Ukraine going that way too, invading both once NATO expansion became plausible for these two.
Of course I am not justifying what Putin did - killing civilians and destroying a country over a NATO membership is a very disproportional response, especially when sitting on all those nukes. He probably knows it himself, which is why he had to come up with other reasons (denazification!) to support his cause.