[Rockstar]

Originally Posted by mapuc

Did or didn't NATO promise Jeltsin that NATO wouldn't expand one inch ?

There's some discussion on FB among my Danish friends.

Some say it's Putin who has been altering with history while others say he hasn't we only have to read our history books.

I seem to recall it slightly something with promises to Soviet/Russia.

Markus

No promises, no,treaties,

… And if the East Europeans sought to leave the Warsaw Pact, didn’t that suggest to the Soviet leadership that they might eventually want to join NATO? Gorbachev later said that this simply was not an issue at the time. “The topic of ‘NATO expansion,’” he told an interviewer in 2014, “was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991.”40 But it was not true that “not a single Eastern European country raised the issue” of joining NATO during that period. The idea was in fact broached by East European leaders in meetings with Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger in late February 1990, just days after the Baker assurances had been given; one of them, Hungary’s foreign minister Gyula Horn, actually made public comments in this vein at the time.41 The East Europeans, to be sure, did not press this issue too vociferously. They, like everyone else, were worried that moving ahead too quickly might undermine Gorbachev’s position within the Soviet leadership, and that if he fell everything might be lost. But it was clear enough what they had in mind. As Kohl told President Bush in May, the Soviet leader had “big problems. His East European allies say they want to be in NATO.”42 And indeed Gorbachev himself told French president François Mitterrand that same month that he had told Baker “we are aware of your favorable attitude towards the intention expressed by a number of representatives of Eastern European countries to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and subsequently join NATO.” It was in that context, he said, that he had made his famous suggestion about the USSR joining NATO as well.43

A lot of history with notes and sources in the below study.

https://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/...rg/cv/1990.pdf