Declassified Documents Reveal How the US Lied to Russia about NATO Expansion in the 1990s
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on DECEMBER 25, 2021
Kit Klarenberg
In April 2014, President Vladimir Putin addressed Russia’s Federal Assembly in the wake of Moscow’s reabsorption of Crimea. Over the course of his speech, he laid the blame for an increase in tensions on the West, which he insisted had “lied to us many times, made decisions behind our backs, placed us before an accomplished fact.” At the heart of this apparent duplicity was NATO’s expansion to the East, “as well as deployment of military infrastructure at our borders,” contrary, he said, to its promises.
Ever since, disproving the idea that Western leaders had assured Moscow the bloc wouldn’t encroach on its borders has become an obsession for think tanks and lobby groups. For example, UK policy institute Chatham House brands the suggestion that any pledge was made not to enlarge the controversial military bloc one of the key “myths and misconceptions in the debate on Russia,” whileNATO’s own website likewise claims it is wholly manufactured.
Significant evidence to the contrary has long-been easily accessible, but now the National Security Archive has published a tranche of never-before-seen, highly revealing documents detailing how then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin was consistently manipulated by his US counterpart Bill Clinton on the question during the mid-1990s, while bold, false promises of a “strategic partnership” of the countries faded into nothingness.
Take for instance the transcript of a cordial July 5 1994 telephone conversation between the pair, at which time the US president was preparing to depart for Poland – which had been pushing for rapid absorption by NATO – and the Baltic states, before meeting with Yeltsin at the G7 summit in Italy.
Yeltsin urged Clinton to raise the plight of Russophones in Estonia and Latvia, because “a public statement from you that the US will not support any infringement on the rights of the Russian-speaking people” would mean these countries “will act differently.” He noted Lithuania’s quick granting of citizenship to its Russian minority had prompted Moscow to withdraw its troops from Vilnius, and the same could happen by August in Tallinn and Riga if assurances were made. Yeltsin also wished to discuss NATO expansion.
In response, Clinton swore he’d “raise the issue of the Russian minorities,” and reassured Yeltsin that while NATO might “eventually expand,” he’d set out “no timetable and no requirements.” Instead, he indicated that he’d “like us to concentrate” on Partnership for Peace, a US-led initiative seeking to “achieve a united Europe where people respect each other’s borders and work together.” Yeltsin could be entirely forgiven for thinking the Partnership was Washington’s primary focus, and the military alliance an afterthought, by the conclusion of the chat.
The Russian president’s optimism about “a mutually beneficial partnership with the US on the basis of equality” is writ large in a letter he sent to Clinton in November that year. He speaks of this prospective coalition as “the central factor in world politics,” pledges to cooperate constructively with the US on issues related to Bosnia, Iraq, North Korea, and Ukraine, and eagerly awaits their meeting at the December 5 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Budapest, where “we have much to talk about … first of all, transforming European stability.”
As it was, the Hungary summit was a disaster, with Clinton’s speech at the event focusing on NATO as “the bedrock of security in Europe,” and declaring “no country outside will be allowed to veto expansion” – a clear reference to Russia. In response, Yeltsin fulminated, “it is a dangerous delusion to suppose the destinies of continents and the world … can somehow be managed from one single capital,” and adding that “[moving] the responsibilities of NATO up to Russia’s borders” would be a grave error.
An internal US diplomatic cable from the next day shows lessons were quickly learned from this episode. Namely, the urgent need to keep quiet publicly about US plans for extending the military alliance, while offering bogus private assurances to Moscow any enlargement would only occur after consultation between the two countries, and that Russia was still in the running for bloc membership.
Fast-forward to May 1995, Clinton visits Moscow to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Allied victory in World War II, and these lies are enthusiastically maintained in a one-on-one meeting with Yeltsin. The pair’s rapport is clearly chummy, referring to each other as friends, although serious matters are very much on the table too.
“How do you think it looks to us if one bloc continues to exist while the Warsaw Pact has been abolished? It’s a new form of encirclement if the one surviving Cold War bloc expands,” the Russian president pleaded. “Many Russians have a sense of fear. What do you want to achieve with this if Russia is your partner? We need a new structure for Pan-European security, not old ones! Perhaps the solution is to postpone NATO expansion until the year 2000 so that later we can come up with some new ideas.”
Ever suave and calculating, Clinton sought to allay his fears, somewhat amazingly suggesting Moscow should view his approach to NATO “in the context of greater integration of Russia into other international institutions,” dangling the prospect of various sweeteners, including membership of the G7, if Yeltsin quietened his anti-NATO rhetoric, and kept his opinions on the bloc’s expansion to himself. Clinton knew well that such compliance was easily bought – as his Russian “friend” himself acknowledged, his position heading into the 1996 presidential runoff was “not exactly brilliant.”
Indeed, his polling stood in the single digits, and Communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov was widely forecast to win via landslide. Yeltsin spoke of needing “positive reports” in the press, and to “head off even the smallest wrong moves,” proposing any discussion of NATO enlargement be kept theoretical until the year 2000, and urging the White House resident not to do anything to “rile the situation up before the elections.”
“I’ve made it clear I’ll do nothing to accelerate NATO [expansion]. I’m trying to give you now, in this conversation, the reassurance you need. But we need to be careful that neither of us appears to capitulate,” Clinton slickly pledged. “For you, that means you’re not going to embrace expansion. For me, it means no talk about slowing the process down or putting it on hold or anything like that.”
So it was that Yeltsin agreed to maintain an omerta on the military bloc, and enlist in the Partnership for Peace. Despite plans for NATO expansion already being well-laid by that point, and very much in motion, the Kremlin remained silent about developments – the president’s acquiescence was further ensured by extensive covert and overt US assistance in his election campaign, which was fundamental to transforming an initial 6% standing in the polls to an extremely comfortable victory.
Less than three years later, NATO’s engulfing of the former Soviet sphere finally began, with the incorporation of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. This push was opposed stateside by, among others, George Kennan – formerly a committed ‘cold warrior’, and key figure in the creation of the alliance.
“I think it is the beginning of a new Cold War … The Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else,” he said in May 1998, after the US Senate ratified enlargement. “Of course, there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are – but this is just wrong.”
With tensions between Kiev and Moscow at an all-time high, with the question of Ukraine’s NATO membership at the heart of the dangerous dispute, Kennan’s words give every appearance today of a prophet’s warning coming terrifyingly true.
Kit Klarenberg, an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2021/12/ ... -in-1990s/
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Putin hints at military options in Ukraine
Posted Dec 28, 2021 by M. K. Bhadrakumar
Originally published: Indian Punchline (December 26, 2021 ) |
The Rossiya 1 state television in Moscow broadcast today President Vladimir Putin’s annual press conference on Friday. It conveys a much fuller picture of the grave crisis brewing in the Russian-American relations than what the excerpts in the Russian media sought to convey over the weekend.
Putin has, for the first time, explicitly warned that if the U.S. and NATO decline to provide the security guarantees Moscow has sought, his future course of action will be solely guided by “the proposals that our military experts will make to me.” Clearly, there is no more wriggle room left.
This is anything but the White House cliche that “all options are on the table” when Washington intervened in Venezuela or Syria. Putin implies that since core issues of Russia’s national defence are involved here, military considerations will reign supreme.
That is to say, Russia cannot accept NATO’s eastward expansion and the U.S. deployments in Ukraine and elsewhere in East Europe or the creation of anti-Russian states along its borders. And Russia expects “to reach a legally binding outcome of diplomatic talks on the documents.”
Unsurprisingly, Putin also said Russia will seek to achieve a positive outcome in the talks on security guarantees. Moscow is demanding an early meeting. Interestingly, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has underlined that Moscow is not seeking a presidential meeting between Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden.
The probability is low that the U.S. will agree to give a security guarantee to Russia in legally binding terms. There are obstacles on the way. For a start, Biden simply doesn’t have the political capital to carry the Congress along on a conciliatory path towards normalisation with Russia. A consensus is hard to reach among the U.S’. European allies, too, over the tricky issue of NATO expansion–that is, assuming that Washington is amenable to Russia’s demands (which it is not.)
The Russian Foreign Ministry warned yesterday that not only Ukraine and Georgia, but a possible inclusion of Sweden and Finland in NATO also will have “serious” military and political consequences that won’t be left unanswered by Moscow. Simply put, Russia expects the U.S. and its allies to fulfil the assurance given to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that the NATO would not expand “an inch” further. (The Kremlin-funded RT publicised on Saturday the relevant declassified documents.)
Yet, the heart of the matter is that so soon after the debacle in Afghanistan, NATO’s withdrawal from Ukraine will irreparably dent its credibility. In fact, NATO may wither away if it stops expanding. Unless NATO can focus on an “enemy”, it loses its mooring and lacks a raison d’etre for its very existence. The transatlantic system will be in disarray if NATO starts drifting. And NATO happens to be the anchor sheet of the U.S.’ global strategies. It is as simple as that.
As regards Ukraine, the West bit more than it could chew when the CIA staged a coup in 2014 in Kiev to overthrow the elected government of President Viktor Yanukovich and had it replaced by a pro-U.S. set-up. The regime change agenda was pushed with no real understanding that present-day Ukraine is a country but not a nation.
Ukraine was the creation of Josef Stalin. In a brilliant essay last week, titled Ukraine: Tragedy of a Nation Divided, Ambassador Jack Matlock, the American envoy to Moscow who played a seminal role as the confidante of Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev in negotiating the end of the Cold War, has forewarned that Ukraine has no future without Russia’s helping hand.
On the other hand, the Deep State in the U.S. and large sections of the foreign and security policy establishment in the Beltway have been harbouring fantasies that the CIA can entrap Russia in a quagmire in Ukraine. Last week, David Ignatius at the Washington Post penned a column threatening Moscow that it will face a full-blown guerrilla war backed by the U.S. if it dared to intervene in Ukraine militarily. Matlock’s essay will come as a cold shower to these daydreamers.
The main problem here is that Biden finds himself in a fix personally. Biden had a hands-on role in the regime change project in Ukraine. Whether President Obama delegated the dirty job to Biden or the latter asked fro it, we will never know. Suffice to say, Biden must take the responsibility today for the mess in Ukraine, which has turned into a kleptocracy, a bastion of neo-Nazis, a basket case, and a cesspool of venality and depravity.
One false step and Europe will have a refugee flow from that country (population: 45 million) of such massive proportions right on its doorstep that will make Syria seem a picnic–and this, at a time when the ghost of Yugoslavia is stalking the Balkans.
Equally, given his past record of being an ardent votary of Obama’s containment strategy against Russia, it will be a bitter pill to swallow for Biden if he were to be the Western leader chosen by destiny to underwrite Russia’s national security. And that too, with Vladimir Putin at the helm of affairs in the Kremlin, a leader towards whom Obama and Hillary Clinton harboured visceral hatred.
Biden himself has barely concealed his dislike of the Russian leader. Biden brought into his presidency as his foreign policy team people who are known to be Russophobes. The incumbent Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland was personally involved in the regime change in Kiev in 2014 and is today in charge of the policies on Ukraine.
The protagonists in Washington have been delusional. Fundamentally, they fancied that Russia is a declining power–a broken, sulking, petulant country nostalgic for its superpower pedestal. Dire prophesies of Russian collapse have belatedly given way lately to a grudging acceptance that Russia is a persistent power. Russia’s resurgence–its soft and has power as well as its smart power–has taken the West by surprise.
The upgrading of Russia’s nuclear and conventional forces under Putin has produced staggeringly impressive results. Putin restored the nation’s pride that it is the “heir to an old and enduring identity–forged during the time of Peter the Great and persisting through the Soviet era–as a major player on the international stage”–to quote from a commentary by Andrew Latham, American professor in international relations, titled Reports of Russia’s decline are greatly exaggerated.
Why such a crisis at this point in time? The crux of the matter is that the U.S. has decided that it must first clip Russia’s wings before taking on China. Although there is no formal military alliance between Moscow and Beijing, Russia provides “strategic depth” to China simply by being a great power pursuing independent foreign policies and sharing an alternate vision to the so-called liberal international order in terms of a democratised world order based on UN Charter and multipolarity. The Russia-China relations are at their highest level in history today.
The pragmatism of the Russian elite is legion. The Americans apparently thought that the Kremlin can be placated somehow. Putin’s statements must have come as a rude shock. The point is, Russia’s maximalist demands and minimalist stance are one and the same. That leaves no leeway for wheeling-dealing for even a consummate politician like Biden.
“We have nowhere to retreat,” Putin said, adding that NATO could deploy missiles in Ukraine that would take just four or five minutes to reach Moscow.
They have pushed us to a line that we can’t cross. They have taken it to the point where we simply must tell them: ‘Stop!’
https://mronline.org/2021/12/28/putin-h ... n-ukraine/
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Russia has the right to use the army to protect its citizens in Donbass - Kosachev
The vice-speaker of the Federation Council in an interview with Interfax said that Moscow is not developing plans for a military invasion of any states, but this does not concern national security issues.
Kosachev commented on the situation with the escalation of tension in the east of Ukraine, noting the country's right to use the Armed Forces to protect its citizens in Donbass in the event of a danger to their lives.
The representative of the Federation Council stressed that Russia is monitoring how the situation around Donbass is developing. According to Kosachev, Ukraine is not the sole initiator in this matter - Western patrons are pushing it to take radical steps.
“Moreover, the provocateurs both inside and outside Ukraine understand exactly what will happen in this case. Without prejudging the development of events, I will simply remind these provocateurs that after the tragedy of Tskhinvali, serious amendments were made in Russia in November 2009 into the current federal law "On Defense", - he said.
Kosachev stressed that there is the tenth article of the law, which allows the prompt use of Russian troops to protect their citizens abroad in the event of an attack on them.
https://novorosinform.org/rossiya-imeet ... 86389.html