Last week saw another major newsworthy event that had the honour of being completely and silently ignored by the Western MSM. And that is no wonder. For one, the news item reaffirmed what was said before, and vehemently denied by USNATO: the reassurance given to Gorbachev that the block would not be expanding Eastwards of the Eastern Germany’s Border once the West (read: USA) got control of the whole of Germany.
The extensive report from the National security Archive, titled “NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard” demonstrates that assurances were, indeed, given from various NATO politicians and military top brass.
However, not even 10 years passed when the military block, having seen no repercussions for invading, bombing and demolishing the sovereign state of Yugoslavia – in breach of the international law, set its course Eastwards, creeping ever closer to the Russian borders, all the while increasing the demonising rhetoric aimed at Russia. You can see the dynamics of the expansion on the map below:
And so, the news, as published in RT:
Gorbachev WAS promised NATO would not expand east – declassified docs
In 1990, Western politicians repeatedly assured Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO wouldn’t expand east of Germany’s borders, but broke that promise less than a decade later, say insider archives from both sides of negotiations following the dismantling of the Berlin Wall.
Researchers from the respected George Washington University-based National Security Archive, which specializes in obtaining key declassified information from the government, have put together 30 crucial documents that clearly show several top Western officials vowing to Gorbachev in unison that NATO would not expand eastward. Some of these have been publicly available for several years, others have been revealed as a result of Freedom of Information requests for the study.
…
Other free and independent media published their own articles and commentary to the revelation. Here is an article from Russia Insider, republishing the article from National Interest:
Just take a look at the number of assurances given!
The West lied to Moscow and then lied about the lying. It can’t lie any longer.
Gorbachev only accepted German reunification—over which the Soviet Union had a legal right to veto under treaty—because he received assurances that NATO would not expand after he withdrew his forces from Eastern Europe from:
James Baker,
President George H.W. Bush,
West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher,
West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl,
the CIA Director Robert Gates,
French President Francois Mitterrand,
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,
British foreign minister Douglas Hurd,
British Prime Minister John Major,
and NATO secretary-general Manfred Woerner.
One very chilling fragment is the quotation of a prophetic interview of the American diplomat George F. Kennan:
“Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era,” Kennan wrote on February 5, 1997 in a New York Times op-ed. “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”
Kennan’s sage advice was ignored, and the exact scenario he warned about has today come to pass. More than 25 years after the end of the Cold War, relations between Moscow and Washington are at their lowest point since the fall of the Soviet Union. Indeed, some have suggested that the United States and Russia are entering into a new cold war of sorts.
USA surely shot itself in the foot there, but, in a way, that was a positive move to awaken Russia from its self-destructive complacency.
Lada Ray offers some more insight in her expanded commentary to the Rt article in:
New Documents Prove US Lied to Gorbachev and Broke Promise of NATO Eastward Non-Expansion
The evidence presented in the video above shows without a shadow of a doubt that US/Germany/EU/NATO lied and swindled Russia and the USSR. The temporary weakness of Russia was used as an excuse to break promises. Moreover, Germany never paid in full the agreed upon compensation for the withdrawal of Soviet troops, and we are talking billions of euros (plus close to 30 years worth of intrest!). This Germany denies as well, but I’m sure the documents to that effect will also come to light in due course. By the way, I have discussed this issue in Earth Shift Webinar 6: THE PUTIN ENIGMA.
EDIT:
Today Russia Insider published a follow-up article by Eric Magrolis, someone who was there as the historical move and the historical lie happened:
‘Sorry Chump, You Didn’t Have it in Writing’
The Poles, Hungarians and Czechs were brought into NATO, then Romania and Bulgaria, the Baltic States, Albania, and Montenegro. Washington tried to get the former Soviet Republics of Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. The Moscow-aligned government of Ukraine was overthrown in a US-engineered coup. The road to Moscow was open.
All the bankrupt, confused Russians could do was denounce these eastward moves by the US and NATO. The best response NATO and Washington could come up with was, ‘well, there was no official written promise.’ This is worthy of a street peddler selling counterfeit watches.
By the way, consider this paragraph, and dwell on the numbers:
Gorbachev was a humanist, a very decent, intelligent man who believed he could end the Cold War and nuclear arms race. He ordered the Red Army back from Eastern Europe. I was in Wunsdorf, East Germany, HQ of the Group of Soviet Forces, Germany, and at Stasi secret police HQ in East Berlin right after the pullout order was given. The Soviets withdrew their 338,000 troops and 4,200 tanks and sent them home at lightening speed.
Soviet Union was not prepared to take that large a number of servicemen back – there was no local infrastructure, no prepared dislocation settlements. All this put a huge additional economic strain on the already ailing economy of the USSR, and was one of the many blows, dealt to it by the West.