nato hq

© Dursun Aydemir / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

A newly discovered document from March 1991 shows US, U.k., French, and German officials discussing a pledge fabricated to Moscow that NATO would not aggrandize to Poland and beyond. Its publication past the German magazine Der Spiegel on Fri comes as expansion of the The states-led bloc has led to a armed forces standoff in Eastern Europe.

The minutes of a March half dozen, 1991 meeting in Bonn betwixt political directors of the strange ministries of the US, U.k., France, and Germany contain multiple references to "2+4" talks on High german unification in which the Western officials fabricated information technology "clear" to the Soviet Union that NATO would non push into territory east of Germany.

"We made information technology clear to the Soviet Union - in the 2+4 talks, besides as in other negotiations - that nosotros exercise not intend to benefit from the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe," the document quotes US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Canada Raymond Seitz.

"NATO should not expand to the east, either officially or unofficially," Seitz added.

A British representative also mentions the existence of a "general agreement" that membership of NATO for eastern European countries is "unacceptable."

"We had made it articulate during the 2+iv negotiations that nosotros would non extend NATO across the Elbe [sic]," said West German diplomat Juergen Hrobog. "We could not therefore offer Poland and others membership in NATO."

nato meeting

© screenshot via Kommersant
Screenshot of the minutes of a March 6, 1991 meeting of The states, UK, French and German diplomats discussing NATO and Eastern Europe

The minutes later clarified he was referring to the Oder River, the boundary between East Germany and Poland. Hrobog further noted that Westward German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher had agreed with this position as well.

The document was constitute in the UK National Athenaeum past Joshua Shifrinson, a political science professor at Boston University in the US. Information technology had been marked "Secret" simply was declassified at some point.

Shifrinson tweeted on Friday he was "honored" to piece of work with Der Spiegel on the document showing that "Western diplomats believed they had indeed fabricated a NATO non-enlargement pledge."

"Senior policymakers deny a not-expansion pledge was offered. This new document shows otherwise," Shifrinson said in a follow-up tweet, noting that "beyond" the Elbe or Oder by any standard includes Eastern European countries to which NATO started expanding simply eight years later.

During a major press conference in December 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the Due west had promised the Soviet Union NATO would non aggrandize "a unmarried inch" to the east, just "brazenly deceived" and "cheated" Moscow to do but that.

Responding to these comments, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance "has never promised not to expand." In an interview with Der Spiegel later, Stoltenberg repeated that "there has never been such a promise, there has never been such a behind-the-scenes deal, information technology is simply non true."

NATO admitted Poland, Hungary, and Czechia in March 1999, just earlier launching an air war against Yugoslavia without the permission of the UN Security Council. This put NATO directly on the Russian edge - the enclave of Kaliningrad - for the kickoff fourth dimension ever. The side by side round of expansion in 2004 included the sometime Soviet republics of Estonia, Republic of latvia, and Lithuania, placing NATO's eastern frontier just 135 kilometers (84 miles) from St. petersburg.

In a series of security proposals made public in December, Russia demanded NATO publicly renounce expansion to the sometime Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia and withdraw US forces to the 1997 boundaries of the bloc, among other things. The US and NATO have rejected this, arguing the brotherhood'south "open door" membership policy is a fundamental principle for them.