State Again as a Fact 8 Letters
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A newly discovered document from March 1991 shows The states, Uk, French, and High german officials discussing a pledge made to Moscow that NATO would not expand to Poland and beyond. Its publication past the German mag Der Spiegel on Friday comes as expansion of the United states of america-led bloc has led to a military standoff in Eastern Europe.
The minutes of a March vi, 1991 meeting in Bonn between political directors of the foreign ministries of the United states, United kingdom, French republic, and Germany contain multiple references to "two+four" talks on German unification in which the Western officials made it "articulate" to the Soviet Union that NATO would not button into territory east of Germany.
"Nosotros fabricated it clear to the Soviet Union - in the two+iv talks, also as in other negotiations - that we practice not intend to do good from the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe," the document quotes US Banana Secretary of State for Europe and Canada Raymond Seitz.
"NATO should not expand to the east, either officially or unofficially," Seitz added.
A British representative also mentions the being of a "full general agreement" that membership of NATO for eastern European countries is "unacceptable."
"We had fabricated information technology articulate during the ii+4 negotiations that we would not extend NATO beyond the Elbe [sic]," said Due west German diplomat Juergen Hrobog. "We could not therefore offer Poland and others membership in NATO."
© screenshot via Kommersant
Screenshot of the minutes of a March 6, 1991 meeting of United states of america, Britain, French and German diplomats discussing NATO and Eastern Europe
The minutes later antiseptic he was referring to the Oder River, the purlieus between Due east Germany and Poland. Hrobog further noted that West High german Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Foreign Government minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher had agreed with this position as well.
The document was plant in the U.k. National Archives by Joshua Shifrinson, a political science professor at Boston University in the US. It had been marked "Clandestine" but was declassified at some signal.
Shifrinson tweeted on Friday he was "honored" to work with Der Spiegel on the document showing that "Western diplomats believed they had indeed made a NATO non-enlargement pledge."
"Senior policymakers deny a non-expansion pledge was offered. This new document shows otherwise," Shifrinson said in a follow-up tweet, noting that "beyond" the Elbe or Oder by any standard includes Eastern European countries to which NATO started expanding just eight years subsequently.
During a major press conference in December 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the Westward had promised the Soviet Marriage NATO would not aggrandize "a unmarried inch" to the eastward, but "brazenly deceived" and "cheated" Moscow to practice but that.
Responding to these comments, NATO Secretarial assistant Full general Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance "has never promised non to aggrandize." In an interview with Der Spiegel later on, Stoltenberg repeated that "there has never been such a promise, there has never been such a behind-the-scenes deal, it is simply not true."
NATO admitted Poland, Hungary, and Czechia in March 1999, just earlier launching an air war confronting Yugoslavia without the permission of the UN Security Quango. This put NATO directly on the Russian border - the enclave of Kaliningrad - for the outset fourth dimension always. The adjacent round of expansion in 2004 included the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, placing NATO'due south eastern frontier only 135 kilometers (84 miles) from St. Petersburg.
In a serial of security proposals made public in December, Russian federation demanded NATO publicly renounce expansion to the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia and withdraw U.s.a. forces to the 1997 boundaries of the bloc, among other things. The Us and NATO have rejected this, arguing the alliance's "open door" membership policy is a fundamental principle for them.
Comment: A former German language defence official, Willy Wimmer, too said he personally witnessed the West vowing not to aggrandize east in an RT interview.
The veteran politician, who served every bit parliamentary secretary to Germany's defense government minister between 1985 and 1992, said that he personally witnessed this hope when he "sent Chancellor Helmut Kohl the statement on the Bundeswehr in NATO and NATO in Europe, which was completely incorporated into the treaties on reunification."
Berlin's decision at that fourth dimension "not to station NATO troops on the territory of the old East Germany and to end NATO well-nigh the Oder" was part of this promise. He explained why the West quickly inverse class:
Wimmer believes that the promises made by the Western leaders in the early 1990s were eventually dashed by the US ambitions formulated in the infamous 1992 'Wolfowitz Doctrine'.The 'doctrine' was in fact a Defense Planning Guidance for the 1994-1999 financial years that was leaked to the New York Times at that fourth dimension and sparked a moving ridge of criticism even in the Usa itself. The document outlined the policy of unilateralism and pre-emptive military machine deportment designed to suppress potential threats and prevent any supposedly authoritarian states from becoming superpowers. The official text of the guidance was and so inverse following the uproar but many tenets of the 'doctrine' however found their style into the former US President George W. Bush'due south foreign policy.
Since that time, the US and its allies have been on the "wrong runway" every bit they accept been nearly doing everything to create a adequately "justified" impression in Moscow that the Western nations seek to "kick Russia out of Europe, to build a new wall between the Baltic and the Blackness Ocean" and eventually to "destroy" Russia instead of cooperating with it, Wimmer pointed out.
Source: https://www.sott.net/article/464659-Der-Spiegel-confirms-that-NATO-deceived-Russia-when-they-promised-to-not-to-expand-its-border-east
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