[Politics] In Ukraine Conflict, Putin Relies on a Promise That Ultimately Wasn’t

[JOYBOY]

The current confrontation turns partly on what, if any, commitments Secretary of State James A. Baker III made about NATO’s expansion in the waning days of the Cold War.

WASHINGTON — When officials from Russia and the United States sit down in Geneva on Monday for high-profile discussions with another war in Europe on the line, hovering over the talks will be an American diplomat who will not even be in the room.

Nearly 30 years after James A. Baker III stepped down as secretary of state, the current confrontation over Ukraine turns in part on a long-running argument about what, if any, commitments he made to Moscow in the waning days of the Cold War and whether the United States fulfilled them.

President Vladimir V. Putin and other Russian officials have asserted that Mr. Baker ruled out NATO expansion into Eastern Europe when he served as President George H.W. Bush’s top diplomat. The West’s failure to live up to that agreement, in this argument, is the real cause of the crisis now gripping Europe as Mr. Putin demands that NATO forswear membership for Ukraine as the price of calling off a potential invasion.

But the record suggests this is a selective account of what really happened, used to justify Russian aggression for years. While there was indeed discussion between Mr. Baker and the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the months after the fall of the Berlin Wall about limiting NATO jurisdiction if East and West Germany were reunited, no such provision was included in the final treaty signed by the Americans, Europeans and Russians.

“The bottom line is, that’s a ridiculous argument,” Mr. Baker said in an interview in 2014, a few months after Russia seized Crimea and intervened in eastern Ukraine. “It is true that in the initial stages of negotiations I said ‘what if’ and then Gorbachev himself supported a solution that extended the border that included the German Democratic Republic,” or East Germany, within NATO. Since the Russians signed that treaty, he asked, how can they rely “on something I said a month or so before? It just doesn’t make sense.”

In fact, while Mr. Putin accuses the United States of breaking an agreement it never made, Russia has violated an agreement it actually did make with regard to Ukraine. In 1994, after the Soviet Union broke apart, Russia signed an accord along with the United States and Britain called the Budapest Memorandum, in which the newly independent Ukraine gave up 1,900 nuclear warheads in exchange for a commitment from Moscow “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and “to refrain from the threat or use of force” against the country.

link:https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/09/us/politics/russia-ukraine-james-baker.html