Author: Julie Kim
Introduction
Russian leaders have long made claims repeatedly criticizing NATO’s violation of its supposed promise to not expand eastwards made during the re-unification of East and West Germany.
In this article, we will examine whether or not such a promise was made, if it had ever been solidified as an official part of NATO policy, and explore Russia’s own actions in the context of international policy.
What did NATO actually promise (and was the promise kept)?
With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Germany began a reunification process that re-established democratic governance over all of Germany. This event also marked the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and of the Soviet Union itself.
Though no one predicted the extent of the Soviet collapse when the Berlin Wall fell, all sides were aware that the situation in Germany needed to be handled carefully. Negotiations began quickly, during which Western leaders provided reassurances to pacify Soviet security concerns, as the Soviets prepared to relinquish their control over East Germany.
The National Security Archive, a non-profit research institute, archive, and investigative journalism center, provides insight into the discussions held between Western and Soviet authorities.
U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard | National Security Archive // National Security Archive (George Washington University), December 12, 2017
Russian authorities later claimed that this promise, and other assurances, were broken by the addition of more European countries to NATO.
However, as American think tank Brookings Institution points out, these assurances had only ever been made in regards to Germany.
Western leaders never pledged not to enlarge NATO, a point that several analysts have demonstrated. Mark Kramer explored the question in detail in a 2009 article in The Washington Quarterly. He drew on declassified American, German and Soviet records to make his case and noted that, in discussions on German reunification in the two-plus-four format (the two Germanys plus the United States, Soviet Union, Britain and France), the Soviets never raised the question of NATO enlargement other than how it might apply in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR).
Did NATO Promise Not to Enlarge? Gorbachev Says “No” | Brookings // Brookings, November 6, 2014
Dr. Philip Dandolov, lecturer at the University of National and World Economy, further corroborates this point:
James A. Baker, [author of “not one inch eastward” quote] who served as the US Secretary of State between 1989 and 1992, has consistently challenged the notion that the United States ever expressed an intention to halt the process of admitting new countries into NATO.
NATO’s Eastward Expansion and the Supposed Betrayal of Russia | Geopolitical Monitor // Geopolitical Monitor, July 7, 2025
The context of Baker’s “not one inch eastward” promise has often been misconstrued.
This oft-cited remark referred solely to the stationing of NATO troops in eastern Germany after reunification. It had nothing to do (and nor could it) with possible future decisions by sovereign nations in Central and Eastern Europe. Mikhail Gorbachev confirmed this in 2014, stating that the issue of NATO expansion “was not discussed at all” beyond Germany.
Sympathy With the Devil: The Lie of NATO Expansion – CEPA // CEPA, March 19, 2025
Mikhail Gorbachev was a central figure involved in discussions with Western representatives. As the leader of the Soviet Union during this period, he was the ultimate authority on the Soviet understanding of Western promises from these negotiations. These talks ultimately led to his agreement to German unification, with one of the conditions being halting further deployment of NATO troops in Germany as noted above.
In a 2014 interview, Gorbachev himself insists that NATO has not violated the promises made to him, evidently irked at a question implying naivete on his part. (Emphasis ours.)
[Question from outlet RBTH]: One of the key issues that has arisen in connection with the events in Ukraine is NATO expansion into the East. Do you get the feeling that your Western partners lied to you when they were developing their future plans in Eastern Europe? Why didn’t you insist that the promises made to you – particularly U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s promise that NATO would not expand into the East – be legally encoded? I will quote Baker: “NATO will not move one inch further east.”
M.G.: The topic of “NATO expansion” was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn’t bring it up, either. Another issue we brought up was discussed: making sure that NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces from the alliance would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR [East Germany] after German reunification. Baker’s statement, mentioned in your question, was made in that context. Kohl and [German Vice Chancellor Hans-Dietrich] Genscher talked about it.
Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done. And fulfilled. The agreement on a final settlement with Germany said that no new military structures would be created in the eastern part of the country; no additional troops would be deployed; no weapons of mass destruction would be placed there. It has been observed all these years. So don’t portray Gorbachev and the then-Soviet authorities as naïve people who were wrapped around the West’s finger. If there was naïveté, it was later, when the issue arose. Russia at first did not object.
The decision for the U.S. and its allies to expand NATO into the east was decisively made in 1993. I called this a big mistake from the very beginning. It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990. With regards to Germany, they were legally enshrined and are being observed.
Mikhail Gorbachev: I am against all walls – Russia Beyond // Russia Beyond, October 16, 2014
Though he feels the “spirit” of the assurances was violated, Gorbachev is clear that the promises made to him were kept, specifically stating that the famous “not one inch eastward” promise has been observed in full.
Were there ever official agreements?
No official policies were ever made that would forbid NATO from inviting European states to join the alliance. As think tank Friends of Europe writes,
In this context, there were no agreements or treaties that prohibited NATO from accepting new members, nor were there secret assurances not to expand NATO eastward. While the notion of ‘eastward expansion’ did come up in the discussions, this was not related to NATO expansion. Rather, it was about the decision whether to move NATO troops into the then eastern borders of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). That is the context for which to understand Baker’s famous note that he jotted down after his meeting with Gorbachev: “End result: Unified Ger. anchored* in a changed (polit.) NATO –* whose jurisd. would not move* eastwards!”
Countering disinformation on German reunification and NATO enlargement – Friends of Europe // Friends of Europe, November 9, 2019
Moreover, regardless of any statements that might have been made between Western and Soviet authorities, verbal promises do not serve as official policy decisions. (Emphasis ours.)
Nonetheless, NATO and senior Western officials have continued to claim that there was no such official promise. None of the assurances of non-expansion were included in any treaty documents, as NATO makes clear in its official explanation on its website: “NATO allies take decisions by consensus and these are recorded. There is no record of any such decision having been taken by NATO. Personal assurances, from NATO leaders, cannot replace alliance consensus and do not constitute a formal NATO agreement.”
How Gorbachev was misled over assurances against NATO expansion // NATO Watch, January 2, 2018
NATO decisions cannot be made unilaterally by individual member nations, or by the leaders of those nations.
It would be tempting from the standpoint of the Russians to appoint a certain country (with the most logical choice being the United States) to be the one to speak on behalf of all of NATO, but in reality, the alliance’s consensus rule remains sacrosanct, with the smaller nation-states more than capable of affecting the calculations of their larger peers.
NATO’s Eastward Expansion and the Supposed Betrayal of Russia | Geopolitical Monitor // Geopolitical Monitor, July 7, 2025
Non-treaty promises don’t hold water in international relations
In international politics, verbal promises are not considered binding commitments, especially across different administrations and changes of government. There is even less expectation that informal assurances made decades ago to a country that no longer exists (the Soviet Union) would carry any binding force today.
It is not certain that these “secret promises” made to the Soviets by Western leaders ever existed. And most importantly: even if they did, they would not be legally binding agreements – a fact of which the Soviet Union would have been well aware.
Even if promises were made privately to the Soviets by Western leaders, they would not carry enduring legal or political weight. After all – nothing was signed.
Dr. Philip Dandolov, also referenced above, aptly remarks on the unreasonableness of Russian authorities to expect any kind of verbal promise to be upheld across multiple decades in a complex, ever-changing political landscape.
It must also be taken into account that even if explicit promises had been made by US and German politicians in the 1990s, it is difficult to see how they could have reasonably been expected to be ironclad and ever-lasting. […]
Theoretically, a sovereign state that is far from an influential actor in international politics can enter the ranks of the middle or even the great powers over the span of less than 50 years. Thus, an unspoken agreement from the 1990s barring countries such as Poland or Ukraine from joining an alliance like NATO is not cognizant of the reality that the status of nation-states is not set in stone and countries once regarded as mere pawns in the context of great power competition may at some point in the future be able to turn certain arrangements on their heads in accordance with their own national interests.
NATO’s Eastward Expansion and the Supposed Betrayal of Russia | Geopolitical Monitor // Geopolitical Monitor, July 7, 2025
In international relations, only formal agreements create expectations that bind successor governments. A statement from an elected politician has no legal weight once a new government is in power. No one familiar with the norms of international politics would sincerely feel surprise at a country shifting policy under a new government, let alone feel betrayal after three decades and multiple changes of leadership.
What is Russia’s own approach to international agreements?
Vladimir Putin and other Russian authority figures have pushed a narrative claiming that the West has betrayed Russia as a result of these allegedly broken promises. Yet Russia has a long-standing history of violating binding treaties and international agreements to suit the country’s own needs.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 marks a clear violation of multiple treaties that the Russian government had signed.
[W]hen the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, the resulting independent states recognized one another in their then-existing borders. Russia’s seizure of Crimea from Ukraine violated, among other agreements, the UN Charter, the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum of Security Assurances for Ukraine and the 1997 Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between Ukraine and Russia.
Crimea: Six Years after Illegal Annexation | FSI // Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University, March 16, 2020
Given the Kremlin’s disregard for formal written agreements that carry political weight, its fixation on an alleged and unofficial “promise” made by the West could be regarded as hypocritical.
The rhetoric regarding the broken promises and betrayals of the West also has a hollow ring to it given that all it took was a decisive shift in a pro-Western direction among Ukrainians (in the aftermath of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution) for the Putin administration to quickly refuse to abide by many existing written and unwritten commitments in relation to Ukraine. In 2014, the Russian president described the post-Euromaidan Ukraine as a new legal entity and explicitly stated that Russia no longer felt bound by any of the provisions of the Budapest Memorandum in relation to the territorial integrity of Ukraine.
NATO’s Eastward Expansion and the Supposed Betrayal of Russia | Geopolitical Monitor // Geopolitical Monitor, July 7, 2025
We find that Russia routinely disregards not just “handshake agreements,” but binding international treaties.
How does this fit with their insistence that disputed, unwritten “assurances” from decades ago must be strictly honored? Russia’s concern about promises kept or broken appears to depend entirely upon their own convenience.
Summary
The claim of a broken NATO promise does not stand up to scrutiny. NATO never adopted any policy promising not to expand, and it could not have done so without formal consensus among its members – a fact of which the Soviets were fully aware.
No treaty or official commitment exists, and it is not even clear that such assurances were ever made or discussed. The Soviet leader himself later stated that all agreed terms were fully honored by NATO. Since then, governments have changed and the Soviet Union has dissolved, making it unrealistic to treat any alleged verbal understanding as binding decades later.
It is also worth noting the stark contrast between Russia’s insistence on an undocumented, informal promise to be upheld with its own record of breaking signed formal agreements.
All sources: NATO
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