Latest fact checks & sources

March 18 marks the sixth anniversary of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea. Attention now focuses on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in Donbas, a conflict that has taken some 14,000 lives, but Moscow’s seizure of Crimea – the biggest land-grab in Europe since World War II – has arguably done as much or more damage to Europe’s post-Cold War security order.

NATO enlargement has been at the heart of several heated security debates. Pundits and scholars alike have conflated several ‘promises’ not to extend NATO eastward. Much of their arguments draw from the Baker-Gorbachev and Kohl-Gorbachev discussions of the early nineties. There is only one little problem with this wonderful saga of so-called ‘promises’ – it’s just that, a saga, not a fact. Here’s what actually happened: there were two separate negotiations. One for German reunification in 1990 and a second, separate negotiation for the post-1991 opening of NATO. Conflating the two negotiations is an analytical mistake that leads to spurious conclusions.

President Trump has repeatedly criticised his Nato allies for not spending enough on defence. Nato is a military alliance of 32 countries including the US, Canada and European nations. It has significant deployments along its eastern flank, designed to deter Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. There are signs that Trump’s criticisms have had some effect, with significant increases in spending from some members.

Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major and Woerner

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.

It is abundantly evident that Russian President Vladimir Putin is no fan of NATO. Indeed, he displays a pronounced – almost obsessive – antipathy toward the Alliance. He claims that NATO took advantage of Russian weakness after the collapse of the Soviet Union to enlarge to its east, in violation of promises allegedly made to Moscow by Western leaders. But no such promises were made – a point now confirmed by someone who was definitely in a position to know: Mikhail Gorbachev, then president of the Soviet Union.

As the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approached, Maxim Korshunov of RBTH sat down with Mikhail Gorbachev, the first and last president of the Soviet Union, to discuss the historic rapprochement between East and West and the prospects for a new Cold War.

On September 20, the official Twitter account of the Permanent Mission of Russia in Geneva published a photo entitled “Modern Ukraine. Human Rights on the Upgrade”, showing a building with Ukrainian and Nazi flags. However, this photo has been “wandering” around the Network under different titles for a long time. Let us recall that it was taken during the shooting of a movie in Kharkiv in 2011.