Declassified documents refute Blinken and Stoltenberg’s claims that NATO “has never made a promise not to expand” parisbeacon com 26732 January 9 2022 US Secretary of State Antony Blinken assured this Friday that NATO has never offered not to expand in the direction of Russia’s borders However the reappearance of a number of declassified documents suggests otherwise La Otan never promised not to admit new members“the senior American diplomat told reporters during a wheel press release commenting on Moscow’s proposals to the bloc regarding the security guarantees before the next meetings between NATO and Russia on the matter Underlining that the “open door policy“is a fundamental provision of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty Blinken noted that both Mikhail Gorbachev – the Soviet leader who would have received guarantees of non-expansion from Western leaders – such as the former US Secretary of State James Baker which would have provided them among others they denied that something like that had happened It also indicated that Moscow had recognized the right for each nation to choose its own path in the field of security by acceding to the Charter on European Security in 1999 1 2 Similar statements came from NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg last month after Russia delivered its draft agreements with the alliance and the US that would put a brake on the bloc’s advance toward the United States post-soviet space However from a set of documents declassified In 2017 it follows that both Blinken and Stoltenberg are wrong Dozens of records analyzed by George Washington University National Security Archive researchers Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton show that many Western leaders rejected the idea of ”Central and Eastern Europe joining NATO from the early 1990s to 1991 “and that the Russian” complaints “about its subsequent expansions were written” in multiple chat memos between the Soviets and the western interlocutors of the highest level“ On repeated occasions Russian leaders claimed that NATO had broken its promises to the USSR by devouring Central european and looking into the post-Soviet space The NATO-Russia Council meeting scheduled for January 12 will take place amid the West’s fears of a military invasion Russian of Ukraine that supposedly the Kremlin would be weighing up For its part Moscow rejects all accusations and accuses the bloc of militarizing the neighboring country 2 2