Impavidus27

⚡️Mikhail Gorbachev, last Soviet leader, confirms in an interview: NATO's 'no expansion' promise was a myth. The explicit promise he's yelling about boils down to one sentence James Baker tossed out in feb, 1990: “not one inch eastward" — said while they were figuring out how to put a reunited Germany inside NATO without crossing a line with the soviets. Gorbachev himself has said dozens of times since that It was never written down—It was never ratified—It was only ever about the territory of the former East Germany (the GDR). Now in 2014 and 2015 interviews he literally called the idea that this blocks NATO enlargement today a myth and nonsense. Here's Gorbachev in his words, 2015: The decision for the unification of Germany was made without any discussion of NATO enlargement... Using that conversation from 1990 as a pretext for today's events is absurd. Putin keeps waving this one off the cuff Baker line like it's the Treaty of Westphalia, while ignoring Kohl, Genscher, Bush, Shevardnadze —everybody in the room, saying the same thing: NO treaty, NO blanket ban. The actual treaty that ended the matter (the Two Plus Four Agreement) has zero words about NATO staying out of Poland, Hungary, the Baltics, or anywhere else. Every single ex-Warsaw Pact country that joined NATO after 1998—did it voluntarily because they remembered 1956, 1968, and ofc 2022. It’s an empty promise that never existed outside one informal chat—and Putin turned it into his favorite security-blanket excuse to bully neighbors who dare to choose their own path. To this day, Gorbachev still says that the promise never went beyond German borders.