Original article (in Bosnian) was published on 18/05/2023
The Belgrade editorial office of Sputnik continues to spread the myth about the non-existent agreement according to which NATO will not expand to the east and whose “violation” is actually the “cause” of the war in Ukraine.
On May 13, 2023, the web portal Sputnik published an article titled:
American economist Jeffrey Sachs openly explained what is the real cause of the outbreak of the Ukrainian conflict
The article retells the address of the American economist Jeffrey Sachs during a guest appearance on the YouTube channel of the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute, in which he “explains” that the real reason for the outbreak of war in Ukraine is the eastward expansion of the NATO alliance and the intention of Ukraine to join this military pact. He also states that the so-called Maidan protests in Ukraine were designed and financed by the USA because the Ukrainian people did not want to join NATO.
The article featuring Sachs’s claims was shared by several other web portals from the region.
Did NATO really promise Russia that it would not expand to the east?
Jeffrey Sachs is an American professor of economics and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. In recent years, in public appearances, he presented “conspiracy” narratives about the Covid-19 pandemic and pro-Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine. The Canadian Foreign Policy Institute is an organization which, according to information on its website, informs Canadians about Canada’s trade, military and diplomatic policies abroad.
In his guest appearance, Sachs states the following:
During 1989 and 1990, the USA and Germany directly convinced Gorbachev that NATO would not come even an inch closer to the Soviet Union if the USSR dissolved the Warsaw Pact. You can check the National Security Archive of George Washington University, and the article is called “NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard”. Search the Internet and you will find about 30 archival documents that contain true information.
So, America promised not to expand NATO and, I’ll tell you a secret, America was lying because already in 1992 it was planning to expand NATO, among other things, at the expense of Ukraine. I recently spoke with a prominent historian who deals with archival materials and he told me that Ukraine was on that list back in 1992.
As “evidence” for these claims, Sachs also cites the plan to expand NATO into the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, which was presented in a Foreign Affairs article in 1997 by the American academic in the field of international relations and former presidential advisor for national security, Zbigniew Brzezinski, according to which Ukraine should have become a member sometime between 2005 and 2010.
Russian officials have been claiming for decades that there is an agreement between the Soviet Union and the USA from 1990 which guaranteed the USSR that NATO would not expand east of the border established by the Cold War between this alliance and the Warsaw Pact countries. Raskrinkavanje dealt with these claims in the analysis of the Russian anti-Western propaganda narrative on January 27, 2023. As explained in it, in 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, negotiations were held on the unification of Germany, and in September 1990, an agreement was signed between the two German republics, France, the USSR, the USA and the United Kingdom. It foresees the joining of East Germany to the Alliance. The eastward expansion of the NATO alliance was not regulated by it, nor did the West “promise” the Soviet Union that this would not happen. Moreover, the agreement in which such a claim is made does not exist. The article titled “NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard”, which Raskrinkavanje also used in the aforementioned analysis, talks about alleged statements made by Western and Soviet officials at the meetings. US Secretary of State James Baker said at a meeting with USSR leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that “if we maintain our presence in Germany, which is part of NATO, there would be no expansion of NATO jurisdiction for NATO forces one inch to the east”. Baker and other officials have claimed for years that these statements referred to East Germany and not to countries in Eastern Europe. Gorbachev himself claimed this in an interview he gave to Russia Beyond in 2014:
The topic of “NATO expansion” was not discussed at all and was not raised in those years. Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders also did not initiate it. Another issue we raised was the subject of discussion: to ensure that NATO’s military structures will not expand and that additional Alliance troops will not be stationed on the territory of the former GDR after the unification of Germany. Baker’s statement, which you mention in your question, was made in that context. Kohl and Genscher talked about it.
(…)
In the agreement on the final settlement with Germany, it was written that no new military structures would be created in the eastern part of the country; no additional troops will be deployed; weapons of mass destruction would not be placed there. This has been followed all these years.
Although there are contradictory statements about what was said and in what context, and it is difficult to determine with certainty whether the expansion of NATO to the countries of Eastern Europe was discussed in 1989 and 1990, one thing is certain – there is no internationally recognized agreement in which such a thing is guaranteed.
Considering that there is no formal agreement, the potential course of NATO’s expansion in Europe, which was presented by Zbigniew Brzezinski in a Foreign Affairs article in 1997, is not surprising. The article openly talks about the outcomes that would be most favourable to American political interests.
In September 2021, Russia demanded that the US prevent former members of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, from joining the Alliance. The request was rejected, and on that occasion, the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs emphasized that Ukraine has the “exclusive sovereign right” to conduct its own foreign policy and that Ukraine’s membership in NATO can only be determined by Ukraine and NATO.
The relationship between NATO and Ukraine began in 1991 when Ukraine joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In 1997, the NATO-Ukraine Commission was established to deepen cooperation. Since 2009, this body has been overseeing the Euro-Atlantic integration process of Ukraine. In 2017, the Ukrainian parliament adopted a law making NATO membership a strategic goal of the country’s foreign and security policy.
It is important to emphasize that Ukraine, as a sovereign and internationally recognized state, has the right to make decisions about its foreign and security policy and that this right cannot be taken away from it by anyone, including Russia. Considering that there is no formal agreement by which NATO has committed itself not to allow Ukraine or other countries from the region to join the Alliance, it is absurd to seek a “justification” for the Russian invasion of this country in its long-term plan to one day become a member of this alliance. In the end, Putin’s regime did not start a war with NATO member states, which, according to the claims of Russian officials and the media, are “the real culprits of the war” and a threat to Russian security, but with Ukraine, whose formal membership in this military alliance was not even close to implementation in the near future.
Is America behind the Maidan protests?
Sachs also said in the interview:
However, NATO was not lucky that the Ukrainian people, if you look at the polls, were against the expansion of the alliance. Viktor Yanukovych became president in 2010 and advocated the neutrality of Ukraine. He advocated that Russia pay the lease of the Black Sea Fleet military base in Sevastopol until 2042. The Russian fleet has been there since 1783. This was a good reason to remove him, and at the end of 2013, the overthrow of Yanukovych became the goal of American politics.
Protests broke out because Yanukovych did not want to sign the EU Stabilization and Association Agreement. Whether these were protests that were organized from outside or whether they happened spontaneously – we will leave that for later. But soon after, these protests were joined by aggressive militarized groups, especially from western Ukraine.
We learned about it from Viktorija Nuland’s phone conversation, which took place on January 6, 2014, when she discussed who will be part of the new government. In that conversation, she mentioned her partners from Washington. And who are they? Joe Biden and Jack Sullivan. That is, those who participated in the overthrow of Yanukovych are in power today.
When the coup happened, they called me and said: “Come and see the new government”. When I came to the Maidan, there were still crowds of people there. One of the American representatives told me that he was proud of the fact that the Americans financed these protests. The non-governmental organization boasted about how much money it invested in financing the protest. I was shocked when I realized the role of America in the coup d’état in Ukraine.
Claims that the Euromaidan protests against then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych were directed by the West, primarily the US, have been part of the Kremlin’s propaganda narrative for years. It is true that public opinion polls, while Yanukovych was still in power, showed that the majority of Ukrainian citizens were against NATO membership. A survey conducted in 2009 showed that 51% of Ukrainians were against it, while 28% supported such a step. Those figures changed drastically after the Russian annexation of Crimea. The Euromaidan protests, on the other hand, were not related to NATO.
Viktor Yanukovych was the President of Ukraine from 2010 to 2014. He is originally from Donbas, whose biography includes several prison terms, close ties to the Putin regime, accusations of election fraud in 2004 and 2010, and the fact that he did not speak the Ukrainian language until 2002. Public opinion polls in 2011 showed that his support among the population was only 11%.
Protests against his government began at the end of 2013 after he refused to sign the Agreement on rapprochement with the European Union, just days before it was scheduled to do so, even though he had been promising to sign it for years. Half of the Ukrainian population supported the signing of the agreement. In a 2014 article on the web portal Vox, it was explained that the deeper reason for the outbreak of protests was that a large number of Ukrainians saw Yanukovych as an autocratic and corrupt leader, as well as a puppet of Russia.
Tens of thousands of people protested against Yanukovych in Kyiv in November 2013. After the police forcefully chased away peaceful demonstrators from Maidan Square on the night of November 29-30, 2013, the protests turned violent. The violence escalated in February 2014, when government forces opened fire on demonstrators and almost a hundred people lost their lives. The parliament voted to impeach Yanukovych on February 22. He fled to Russia and a provisional government was formed. In the following months, presidential and parliamentary elections were held.
There is no evidence that the United States directed or financed the Euromaidan protests. Such claims are often based on the statement of American diplomat Victoria Nuland, who said at the end of 2013 that the USA had invested five billion dollars in 20 years for the development of democratic processes and reforms in Ukraine. It is, therefore, the money that has been invested since 1991. Nuland confirmed that the US did not finance Euromaidan. It is true that certain American organizations, such as USAID, collaborate with non-governmental organizations and contribute financially to the implementation of projects in various fields in many countries, including Ukraine. However, this does not mean that the US is behind the protests. Since 2004, the Russian government has also invested huge amounts of money in financing non-governmental organizations throughout the former Soviet countries, especially in Ukraine.
Such claims, mostly unfounded, serve as a propaganda tool by which the Russian Federation tries to shift the blame for the invasion of Ukraine and the violation of international law to the West.
Given all the facts, we evaluate the claim suggesting that the USA promised in 1990 that NATO would not expand to the east as a manipulation of facts. The claim from the title of Sputnik’s article that Sachs explained the “real cause” of the war in Ukraine gets the same rating, given that he simply repeated a series of manipulative claims from Russian propaganda narratives. We evaluate the claim suggesting that the Euromaidan protests were organized and financed by the USA as a conspiracy theory.