After decades of the infamous Cold War, General Secretary of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev agreed with the US and NATO to allow East and West Germany to reunite in 1990. In addition, he agreed to dissolve the Warsaw Pact military alliance and withdraw all Soviet military units from Eastern Europe. In return, General Secretary Gorbachev was promised by US Secretary of State James Baker that NATO would not move “one inch Eastward”. Gorbachev kept his word, dissolved the Warsaw Pact, and withdrew all Soviet military units from Eastern Europe. Shortly thereafter, the USSR itself lost its economic war to the West in 1991 when the US led the charge to crash crude oil prices. The 15 Soviet Socialist Republics dissolved into 15 different nations, with the Russian SSR being the successor state of the USSR.
From 1992 to 1999, all was quiet as the 15 former Republics of the defunct Soviet Union were in shambles economically, socially, and militarily. The new Russian Federation moved away from being a Communist state to a quasi Socialist/Capitalist one.
NATO expansion timeline and broken commitments by the US and NATO:
- 1999 Czechia, Hungary and Poland (former Warsaw Pact nations)
- 2004 Bulgaria and Romania (former Warsaw Pact nations), Estonia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia (3 nations on Russian border)
- 2008 President George W Bush announced that Georgia and Ukraine would be allowed to join NATO. Russian President Vladimir Putin states that this is unacceptable. Russia enters military conflict in Georgia after skirmishes.
- 2009 Albania and Croatia
- 2014 US sponsors a coup in Ukraine. Russia seizes the Crimea.
- 2017 Montenegro
- 2020 North Macedonia
- 2022 Russia invades Ukraine
- 2023 Finland
- TBD Sweden
The Warsaw Pact was gone. The Soviet Union was gone. Communism was gone. Yet from 1999 to 2020, NATO continued to ask Vladimir Putin why he was so concerned with his nation being encircled by a hostile military alliance. The West’s newest narrative in 2023 is, because Russia invaded Ukraine, it “caused” Finland and Sweden to join NATO.
Question which begs to be answered: What then “caused” (14) nations to join NATO from 1999 to 2020?
The USSR kept its word, the US and NATO did not. No nation in the West can ever be trusted. They have absolutely zero integrity.
This entire sequence of events was all by design to move NATO right up to Russia’s border, and eventually cause the collapse of the Russian state. Then a fractured Russia could easily be raided by the bandits of the West for its vast natural resources.