"Putin has constructed in his head and in his heart, perhaps, the idea that NATO is encircling him, that that has always been the intention," said Rice, speaking at a Council on Foreign Relations panel on Friday. Afterward, popular support for joining NATO rose among Ukrainians, who had once been more ambivalent about the alliance. Russia's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 was a major turning point. "The louder Moscow protested, the more determined western capitals became to deny Russia what was seen as a veto over alliance decision-making," Samuel Charap, a Russia specialist at Rand Corp., wrote in the Financial Times earlier this month.Īnd the more Putin has tried to control Ukraine and its foreign policy, the more he has pushed Ukrainians themselves to look toward the West, experts said. and NATO in a difficult spot over NATO's "open-door" policy. Now, Russia's protests over Ukraine's future membership have put the U.S. Aspiring members are asked to meet various conditions before they are allowed to begin the process of joining via a " Membership Action Plan." NATO allies have not yet granted that to Ukraine - and have long appeared uninterested in offering, in part because of political complications with Russia. Unfortunately, we're experiencing it now," Gottemoeller said. "It needed another 15 years before the major temper tantrum ensued. When the compromise was announced, some analysts were surprised that "there was not this major temper tantrum" from Putin and Russia, said Rose Gottemoeller, an American diplomat who served as deputy secretary general of NATO from 2016 to 2019. The result was a "worst of all worlds" compromise in 2008, Goldgeier said: a promise that Ukraine would eventually join NATO, but without any concrete timeline or pathway to do so. Politics President Biden says a Russian invasion of Ukraine 'would change the world' But there was always a concern about Ukraine," Goldgeier said. It's one thing for Poland to come in, or the Czech Republic to come in. "The Russians were always concerned about how far NATO enlargement was going to go. In the three decades since, NATO expansion has put four members on Ukraine's borders. Ukraine, as the largest former Soviet republic in Europe besides Russia itself, has been a key part of alliance talks since it declared independence from the USSR in 1991. "Obviously, the more it did to stabilize the situation in central and Eastern Europe and bring them into the West, the more it antagonized the Russians," he said. Over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s, NATO expanded three times: first to add the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland then seven more countries even farther east, including the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and finally with Albania and Croatia in 2009. World Americans should back Ukraine's fight against Russia, former wartime leader says looking to cement its influence in Europe and for countries emerging from communist control, like Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the NATO expansion question became more urgent - both for the U.S. "And that's sort of factually accurate in a narrow sense, but it doesn't reflect the reality of the treaty." Why did the West want to enlarge NATO, and how did Russia react? Still, to this day, Putin is saying, 'Look, there was this other offer on the table, right?' " Sarotte said. "But there's this residual bitterness afterwards. What is not in dispute: Gorbachev later agreed to withdraw from East Germany in exchange for financial concessions, in a treaty that did not place limits on the future expansion of NATO. Contemporaneous notes, letters, speeches and interviews show that Western leaders were, in fact, already contemplating NATO enlargement by the time the February 1990 talks took place, she says. The historical record shows otherwise, according to Sarotte. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said as recently as Friday that "nobody was even imagining Czechoslovakia or Poland or Hungary at that time.")
officials and Gorbachev made years later do not help clear this up. Some say that when Baker suggested that NATO shift not "one inch" to the east, he intended to refer only to East Germany, because neither side had begun to think about NATO expansion beyond that. There is some disagreement about what took place during the Baker-Gorbachev talks in February 1990.
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