NATO deceived Russia, ignored its security interests and backed it into a corner by expanding the Alliance to the east - these are some of the Kremlin's main arguments for the war against Ukraine. Just pure propaganda?
The Kremlin puts forward a number of reasons for its "special operation", as it euphemistically calls its aggressive war against Ukraine. Pro-Russian disinformation campaigns spread all sorts of unproven and false claims. And at least at the beginning of the war, which is being waged with military and information means, they found fertile ground among a large number of people. Among the most famous are the claims that Ukraine was ruled by Nazis or that American biological weapons were produced there.
The latter claim in particular fits into a much older argument that NATO, led by the US, cannot be trusted because it has often ignored Russian security interests and has not kept promises already made.
In one of his first interviews as Russian president in March 2000, Vladimir Putin told the BBC: "We believe that we can talk about broader integration into NATO, but only if Russia is seen as an equal partner". Nothing would even prevent its eventual membership in NATO, Putin added, "if and to the extent that the country's views on equal partnership are taken into account".
Did NATO violate international law in Kosovo?
One specific reason for this concern is NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War in 1999. The operation is considered a precedent in several respects and has been repeatedly cited as important evidence of NATO's supposedly expansionist nature - by commentators on social networks, by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, but also by Western analysts.
The background: After Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia managed to gain their independence from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia at the cost of bloodshed, Belgrade resorted to violence to suppress unrest in Kosovo and expel the Albanian majority from territory that had previously belonged to Serbia. International observers feared a new "ethnic cleansing" - especially in light of the Srebrenica massacre, where nearly 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed in 1995.
Intervention without a UN mandate
With the argument that it needed to prevent a possible humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo, NATO began airstrikes against Serbian positions in March 1999. The bombings lasted 78 days and ended with UN Resolution 1244, after which the Serbian army withdrew from Kosovo and the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was disarmed.
The operation was carried out without a UN mandate, as China and Russia, which is considered Serbia's protector, signaled that they would veto it in the UN Security Council. As a result, many international law experts - including those at the International Court of Human Rights in The Hague - had meanwhile concluded that the operation could not be considered a humanitarian intervention within the meaning of international law. However, it never reached the point of being officially condemned by the UN.
Jim Townsend held a leading position in the US delegation at NATO headquarters in Brussels at the time. In an interview with DW, he stressed that several Western countries had exerted diplomatic pressure on Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to abandon the bloody offensive in Kosovo - without success: "Then they understood that the Serbs did not want to resolve the crisis peacefully, but wanted to demonstrate military resolve." Townsend is convinced that the operation was not directed against Russia, which is traditionally a close ally of Serbia, but was necessary for purely humanitarian reasons.
Did NATO ignore Russia's interests?
The NATO bombing killed about 1,500 people, a third of them civilians. It is impossible to answer the question of how many lives were saved. Benjamin Friedman of the Washington think tank "Defense Priorities" points out that most of the "ethnic cleansing" - numerous mass killings and the expulsion of about 1.5 million. people from their homes - were carried out only after the start of NATO bombing, as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found in 2009.
Friedman does not see the operation as an act of aggression against Russia, but adds: "It shows that the United States and its NATO partners were determined to ignore Russian objections." Jim Townsend, however, says otherwise: "To call NATO an aggressor is ridiculous. If NATO has destabilized the European security architecture in any way, it is by not being strong enough.".
Has NATO broken its promises to Russia?
In spite of everything, Russia and NATO initially drew closer - economically, but also strategically, especially in terms of defense against terrorism. And this despite the fact that Putin - as is clear from the quoted BBC interview - had already repeatedly expressed his concern about NATO's expansion to the east, which at that time already included Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary.
From 2001 onwards, this was compounded by the decisive policy of the new US President George W. Bush, which strengthened the impression - not only in Moscow - that the US would strive for a world order without the UN Security Council. At the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Vladimir Putin unequivocally expressed his disagreement with a "unipolar world order". He then pointed out that representatives of the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States had given guarantees to the Soviet leadership during the negotiations for the “Two Plus Four“ treaty governing German unification that NATO would not expand eastward.
What did NATO promise the Soviet Union?
What exactly was promised then is one of the most controversial issues in relations between Russia and NATO. It is undeniable that no such guarantees were written into the treaties. But there are also well-documented statements by numerous Western diplomats, including Foreign Ministers Hans-Dietrich Genscher and James Baker, that NATO would not expand "not even a centimeter eastward".
In Munich, Putin correctly quoted the words of Manfred Wörner, NATO Secretary General from 1988 to 1994, who in May 1990 publicly stated the following: "The very fact that we are prepared not to deploy NATO forces beyond the borders of the Federal Republic of Germany gives the Soviet Union firm security guarantees."
Many analysts claim that this statement referred only to East Germany. Mikhail Gorbachev, the then president of the Soviet Union, is often cited as a key witness. It is alleged that in an interview in 2014 he refuted his previous statements in which he emphasized the formula "not an inch to the east". There, Gorbachev said: "The topic of "NATO expansion" was not discussed at all".
"Violation of the spirit of the 1990s"
These arguments do not convince Joshua Shifrinson. The professor of international politics at the University of Maryland has analyzed a number of sources on the subject, including the previously confidential minutes of the meeting of the four leading NATO diplomats from the US, UK, France and Germany in March 1991, at which German diplomat Jürgen Krobog stated: "During the "Two plus Four" negotiations, we made it clear that we will not expand NATO beyond the Elbe River. Therefore, we cannot offer Poland and the other countries NATO membership".
According to the minutes, photos of which are also available to DW, the other attendees more or less clearly expressed their agreement with this position. The most categorical is the Frenchman Raymond Seitz: "We clearly stated to the Soviet Union - during the "Two Plus Four" talks, as well as in other talks, that we would not take advantage of the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe".
The argument that only the border of the former East Germany was meant, according to Shifrinson, makes no sense: "To the East" is a direction, and the general understanding is that "to the East" means towards the Soviet Union. People were quite concerned about the future of Eastern Europe as a whole at the time.".
The alleged refutation by Gorbachev was taken out of context, the professor from Maryland also said. Later in the same interview, the Soviet president said regarding the 1993 discussion of NATO's eastward expansion: "This was definitely a violation of the spirit of the declarations and assurances that were given to us in 1990". Shifrinson does not excuse Russia's behavior, but he does not understand why Western leaders simply did not acknowledge that there were such assurances that were later withdrawn.
However, all three experts agree on one thing: whatever mistakes NATO may have made, it is quite clear that the aggressor in the war against Ukraine is Russia.