Putin beordrar styrkor att gå in i Ukraina - INVASION NU (2022-02-24)

And then again in a Kremlin speech after Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014, he accused Western leaders of having “lied to us many times, made decisions behind our backs, placed before us an accomplished fact. This happened with NATO’s expansion to the East.”

After that speech, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer said in an essay, “Western leaders never pledged not to enlarge NATO,” but that the story “fits so well with the picture that the Russian leader seeks to paint of an aggrieved Russia, taken advantage of by others and increasingly isolated—not due to its own actions, but because of the machinations of a deceitful West.”
Most authoritative Western scholars and historians who have studied diplomatic memos, the minutes of meetings and transcripts released by both sides since the 1990s dispute the idea that NATO made any formal pledges.

And Western leaders have vigorously protested the Putin narrative, saying there was never any deal about not expanding NATO into central Europe. Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, on the eve of bilateral talks between American and Russian diplomats in Geneva, told reporters: “NATO never promised not to admit new members. It could not and would not — the ‘open door policy’ was a core provision of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty that founded NATO.”