Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
The batrayal-narrative stems from a chat back in 1990.
For years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned his citizens about NATO’s supposed menace — a military alliance, he claims, plotting to encircle or even invade Russia.
The argument has become central to the Kremlin’s justification for the war in Ukraine.
What’s less known is that Russia once worked alongside NATO. In the 1990s, it contributed a brigade to NATO-led peace operations in Bosnia under a special command arrangement; a Russian general served as SACEUR’s deputy for the Russian contingent — a rare moment of practical cooperation.
That hope collapsed within a decade. By 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, Putin was publicly accusing the West of betrayal.
The speech marked a turning point — the moment Russia’s long-simmering distrust toward NATO became a defining feature of its foreign policy.
The “Not One Inch” debate
In his Munich address, Putin charged that the United States and its allies had broken verbal promises made to Soviet leaders at the end of the Cold War.
Western leaders, he argued, had assured Moscow that NATO would not expand “one inch to the east” — only to later admit former Warsaw Pact states into the alliance.
The claim resonated deeply inside Russia. From Boris Yeltsin to today’s Kremlin establishment, the idea of Western deception became a shared grievance — one that shaped how Russia viewed Europe and its own lost empire.
But what, exactly, was promised?
The 1990 conversation that started it all
Historians often trace the dispute to a single February 1990 conversation between U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
During talks on German reunification, Baker reportedly said that if Moscow agreed to a unified Germany within NATO, the alliance would not move “one inch eastward.”
According to Mary Elise Sarotte’s award-winning book Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of the Cold War Stalemate, this phrase — spoken in a delicate diplomatic context — would take on an outsized symbolic life.
Gorbachev saw it as reassurance, not as a treaty commitment. But in Moscow’s memory, it became a promise.
The next day, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl seemed to echo Baker’s sentiment, telling Gorbachev that NATO would not extend into what was then East German territory. And in May that same year, NATO Secretary General Manfred Wörner gave a speech hinting that expansion wasn’t on the table.
However, Wörner’s remarks were political, not legal, and none of these statements were written into law. Yet for many in Russia, they added up to an understanding — one that would soon be shattered.
What does the treaty actually say?
When the Two Plus Four Agreement was signed on September 12, 1990, it dealt solely with Germany’s status after reunification.
Article 6 affirmed Germany’s right to belong to alliances, extending NATO’s collective-defense umbrella over all of Germany, while barring the stationing or deployment of foreign (non-German) troops and nuclear weapons in the former East Germany.
There was no mention of other Eastern European countries, no explicit ban on expansion, and certainly no written guarantee.
Baker himself later admitted that he might have “got a little forward on his skis.”
Still, the symbolism was clear: for the first time, NATO’s security umbrella had moved eastward — into territory that, just a year earlier, had been under Soviet control.
From unease to accusation
Inside Moscow, many officials warned Gorbachev that he was giving away too much.
Soviet Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov even sought verbal reassurance from Britain’s then–Prime Minister John Major that NATO would not extend further east.
Major said, “nothing of that sort will ever happen,” according to Ambassador Rodric Braithwaite’s contemporaneous diary entry from March 5, 1991.
No written record backed it up. But for the Russians, it reinforced a pattern — verbal comfort from the West followed by policy drift that seemed to say the opposite.
By 1993, with Yeltsin now president, frustration had hardened into protest. In a letter to U.S. President Bill Clinton, Yeltsin argued that NATO’s expansion would violate the “spirit” of the 1990 understanding. American diplomats took the letter seriously enough to ask Germany for a legal assessment.
The German foreign ministry concluded that Yeltsin’s claim had no basis in treaty law — but admitted it could “understand why Russia felt misled.”
Trying to start over
The signing of the Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security was an attempt to reset relations and build trust.
Yet even during those talks, Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov revived old accusations that the West had double-crossed Moscow years earlier.
U.S. officials reviewed the claim internally and found that while some Western officials had floated reassuring language in 1990, none of it amounted to a formal non-expansion pledge.
Legally, the West was in the clear. Diplomatically, the damage was done.
Moments of ooperation
Despite the bitterness, there were flashes of pragmatism.
In 1993, Yeltsin surprised his advisers by telling Polish leader Lech Wałęsa that Poland had every right to pursue NATO membership — a remark that left his inner circle stunned.
In 1997, NATO and Russia signed the Founding Act, formally acknowledging the alliance’s role in Europe’s security framework.
But that uneasy cooperation couldn’t erase the deeper sense of betrayal. For Putin and much of Russia’s political class, NATO’s eastward march became proof that Western diplomacy was built on deceit.
The wound that never healed
Today, decades after those early assurances and denials, the question still lingers: was there ever a promise, or only an interpretation?
Legally, historians like Sarotte say no — there was no binding non-expansion agreement.
But emotionally, many Russians — including those who once sought partnership with the West — still feel the sting of betrayal.
That feeling, more than the facts themselves, fuels Moscow’s enduring suspicion of NATO.
Whether that mistrust can ever be reversed remains uncertain. As history shows, the collapse of trust — once it begins — can last far longer than the moment it was broken.
Sources
- The Guardian: “Did the West promise Moscow that NATO wouldn’t expand?”
- Mary Elise Sarotte, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of the Cold War Stalemate
- BBC, AP Archives
- National Security Archive
- NATO official texts
- German History Docs (treaty text)
- UPI
- Arms Control Association
- Kremlin transcript
