One of the issues that is frequently raised among both scholars and members of the general public, for the most part with the aim of at least partially exonerating Russia when it comes to its actions directed against Ukraine since 2014, concerns the supposed promise on the part of NATO, purportedly made during the events surrounding the USSR’s dissolution, to rule out the further enlargement of the alliance. The so-called assurances provided to Russia have been frequently cited by political scientists who are generally critical of the United States and the Western European countries’ policies in the period preceding the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, with Russian president Vladimir Putin insisting in December 2021 on legally binding guarantees against continued NATO expansion. However, while the West’s indecisive and dithering approach to the Ukrainian crisis may certainly warrant criticism, especially from the standpoint of the Ukrainians, there are ample grounds on which to contest the narrative that NATO has reneged on any of its formal obligations towards Russia under international law or provoked Russia by breaking a “gentleman’s agreement” entered into with the Russian state.
Firstly, if we are to turn to the individual level and carefully examine the opinions of some of the key political figures who either played a crucial role in bringing about the disestablishment of the Soviet Union or simply participated in the negotiations surrounding the shape of the post-Cold War international order, they paint a rather different picture.
In 2014, even though he characterized NATO’s eastward expansion as a “big mistake,” the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev denied that there was any promise made along those lines, pointing out that the enlargement of the alliance was actually not discussed at all in 1990. Admittedly, some of Gorbachev statements made on other occasions are inconsistent with the one above and he has also depicted NATO’s expansion in Eastern Europe as breaking the spirit of certain commitments provided at the end of the Cold War, particularly in the context of the discussions surrounding German reunification. However, the opinions of influential political contemporaries of Gorbachev do not corroborate the existence of any firm long-term assurances in that regard. James A. Baker, who served as the US Secretary of State between 1989 and 1992, has consistently challenged the notion that the United States ever expressed an intention to halt the process of admitting new countries into NATO. While German politician Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who is frequently viewed as the architect of German reunification, made the first concrete statements during a public speech in Bavaria in January 1990, indicating that NATO would not move to the east, he subsequently noted that the Soviets themselves did not feel the need to constantly bring up this topic, i.e. during the negotiations surrounding the Two plus Four Agreement, arguably suggesting that they did not regard the potential NATO expansion as an issue of paramount importance.
Also, as early as the 1990s Russia was arguably able to offer important input pertaining to the post-Cold War security architecture, cooperating with NATO under the auspices of the Partnership for Peace (PfP) program, with the first president of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin notably stating in a September 1993 letter to the US president Bill Clinton that he did not regard the integration of the Eastern European states into NATO as an automatic indication that the alliance would assume an anti-Russian orientation. The Baltic States openly pursued NATO membership in the aftermath of the signing of the Baltic Charter of Partnership with the U.S. in 1998. Rather than vigorously oppose Baltic membership, Russia at least indirectly paved the way for it, for instance by resolving border issues with Lithuania around the same time.
It is certainly the case that informal pledges and guarantees that can give rise to gentlemen’s agreements have their place in international relations and can constrain the behavior of countries, though the given the complex nature of the issue of NATO expansion, one would be inclined to assume that the stakeholders involved would not leave that much room for ambiguity if the matter was indeed regarded as critically important for their long-term national interests. The multitude of discrepancies and incongruities, including those emanating from the Russian side itself, make the existence of such an implicit agreement unlikely.
An archetypal gentlemen’s agreement is the one from 1907, involving the United States of America and the Empire of Japan. Aiming to reduce the tensions between the two countries following the Pacific Coast race riots, it clearly spelled out the conditions to be observed, stipulating that Japan would not permit further immigration of its laborers to the United States and that the United States would refrain from discriminatory treatment of Japanese immigrants already residing in the country.
Furthermore, it is worth keeping in mind that the term “expansion,” especially as used by Russia, can be considered to be an unnecessarily loaded one, as it portrays NATO as a postmodern imperial-like entity that relentlessly pursues the incorporation of other countries into its ranks. Such a characterization of the alliance ignores the agency of the Eastern European countries themselves, which on many occasions have expressed a clear desire to join, subsequently viewing their membership in NATO as a cornerstone of their national security. For instance, while the prospect of Ukraine becoming a member of the alliance first came up officially in 2008 and around that time there was by no means a pro-NATO consensus among ordinary Ukrainians, accession into the Western-led bloc actually constituted a primary strategic goal of the country during the presidencies of both Leonid Kuchma (described in some sources as pro-Russian) and pro-West politician Viktor Yushchenko. In the academic literature there is frequently a focus on the intense lobbying on behalf of Ukraine on the part of US president George W. Bush during the 2008 Bucharest Summit, but the Ukrainians’ clear disappointment due to the participating countries’ eventual refusal to offer Ukraine a NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) is sometimes swept under the carpet.
It must also be taken into account that even if explicit promises had been made by US and German politicians in the 1990s, it is difficult to see how they could have reasonably been expected to be ironclad and ever-lasting. Even though the nature of the US influence on all aspects of NATO policy-making can hardly be overstated, during the abovementioned Bucharest Summit German and French objections ultimately contributed to dampening US enthusiasm and influenced the decision not to offer Ukraine (and Georgia) a clear pathway to membership. Henry Kissinger’s famous, albeit most likely apocryphal, remark “Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?” has some relevance here. It would be tempting from the standpoint of the Russians to appoint a certain country (with the most logical choice being the United States) to be the one to speak on behalf of all of NATO, but in reality, the alliance’s consensus rule remains sacrosanct, with the smaller nation-states more than capable of affecting the calculations of their larger peers.
Theoretically, a sovereign state that is far from an influential actor in international politics can enter the ranks of the middle or even the great powers over the span of less than 50 years. Thus, an unspoken agreement from the 1990s barring countries such as Poland or Ukraine from joining an alliance like NATO is not cognizant of the reality that the status of nation-states is not set in stone and countries once regarded as mere pawns in the context of great power competition may at some point in the future be able to turn certain arrangements on their heads in accordance with their own national interests.
The rhetoric regarding the broken promises and betrayals of the West also has a hollow ring to it given that all it took was a decisive shift in a pro-Western direction among Ukrainians (in the aftermath of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution) for the Putin administration to quickly refuse to abide by many existing written and unwritten commitments in relation to Ukraine. In 2014, the Russian president described the post-Euromaidan Ukraine as a new legal entity and explicitly stated that Russia no longer felt bound by any of the provisions of the Budapest Memorandum in relation to the territorial integrity of Ukraine. By the same token, a relatively minor change to NATO’s Charter would certainly allow the West to credibly argue that any previous agreements between Russia and NATO could be considered null and void.
All in all, the statements of the key political figures who oversaw the collapse of the USSR, Russia’s own tacit acceptance of NATO’s expansion in the 1990s and 2000s, the lack of a mechanism for a single country to emerge as the only authority pertaining to NATO decision-making, as well as a multitude of other factors suggest that it would be far-fetched to regard NATO’s continued enlargement as a betrayal of Russia.
That being said, while the arguments supporting the existence of clear and unambiguous promises made by the West towards Russia are not convincing, if in January or February 2022, the West possessed credible information that a simple declaration on the part of a NATO public figure, such as then secretary general of NATO Jens Stoltenberg, confirming that Ukraine would not be invited to join for the conceivable future, would have at least temporarily dissuaded Russia from its multi-pronged attack against the country as a whole, then it may have made sense to utter such a pronouncement, if only for the fact that the United States and its Western countries were evidently by no means prepared to support Ukraine to the hilt and many US officials initially believed that a quick fall of Kyiv represented the most likely scenario. Of course even if we are to assume that the purported security threats posed to Russia emanating from Ukraine’s potential membership were the primary motivation behind Putin’s actions, which is in itself quite a dubious proposition, whether any type of Western guarantee (even a written one) would have actually been considered sufficiently binding from the standpoint of the Russians who have since 2014 manifested a deep distrust of the West, is another question that does not render itself to an easy answer.