\u201cMost cynical has been the West\u2019s Big Lie that Ukraine would enjoy eventual NATO membership. In 2008, at Washington\u2019s behest, the transatlantic alliance told Georgia and Ukraine that someday they would be inducted. Western officials spent the last 14 years repeating that promise.
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However, Tbilisi and Kiev are no closer to joining, an unofficial recognition that virtually no member wants to add either one. Yet Washington led the consensus rejection of Moscow\u2019s demand that the two states be excluded in the future. Rather than admit the truth, alliance members prevaricated, even though admitting the truth might have forestalled Russia\u2019s attack on Ukraine.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u201cLong forgotten is Vladimir Putin\u2019s conciliatory speech to the German Bundestag more than two decades ago. He explained:<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNo one calls in question the great value of Europe\u2019s relations with the United States. I am just of the opinion that Europe will reinforce its reputation of a strong and truly independent center of world politics soundly and for a long time if it succeeds in bringing together its own potential and that of Russia, including its human, territorial and natural resources and its economic, cultural and defense potential.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He went on to declare: \u201cOne of the achievements of the past decade is the unprecedentedly low concentration of armed forces and armaments in Central Europe and the Baltic. Russia is a friendly European nation. Stable peace on the continent is a paramount goal for our country, which lived through a century of military catastrophes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, his attitude changed as NATO advanced. Despite the mass amnesia that appears to have afflicted the Cold War\u2019s victors, they offered numerous assurances to Soviet and Russian officials that NATO would not march ever eastward to Russia\u2019s borders. For instance, reported George Washington University<\/a> when it released a trove of declassified U.S. documents: \u201cSecretary of State James Baker\u2019s famous \u2018not one inch eastward\u2019 assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The allies also whispered sweet nothings in the ears of Russian President Boris Yeltsin and those around him. Explained GWU<\/a>: \u201cDeclassified documents from U.S. and Russian archives show that U.S. officials led Russian President Boris Yeltsin to believe in 1993 that the Partnership for Peace was the alternative to NATO expansion, rather than a precursor to it, while simultaneously planning for expansion after Yeltsin\u2019s re\u2010election bid in 1996 and telling the Russians repeatedly that the future European security system would include, not exclude, Russia.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a detailed study, UCLA\u2019s Marc Trachtenberg concluded<\/a> that the allies originally promised to respect Moscow\u2019s security interests. However, he added: \u201cIt was only later that U.S. leaders realized that the USSR had become too weak to prevent them from doing whatever they wanted. So by mid\u20101990, the February assurances were no longer taken as binding. What Gorbachev called the \u2018sweet talk\u2019 continued, but the whole vision of a cooperative relationship based on mutual trust and mutual respect, it became increasingly clear, was at odds with the reality. All of this was, and still is, deeply resented in Russia.\u201d\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n