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between the Russia-NATO Council, created in Rome in May 2002, and the Washington Declaration of the summit of the North Atlantic Alliance that has just been held, there is a whole chasm. In just 22 years, five years after the signing of the Founding Act between Russia and NATO, which was presented as the end of the cold Warwent from establishing a mechanism to promote the broadest cooperation between the two to a rupture that has Moscow and Brussels, in the midst of growing tension, suspicions, reproaches and mutual threats, on the brink of an armed conflict, which could lead to a nuclear war in which, by definition, there can be no winner.
In Rome, Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President George W. Bush agreed – three years after Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland had joined NATO – to give a new quality to their relationship as allies. Fighting threats and risks togetheras well as to build a lasting peace open to all in the Euro-Atlantic region on the principles of democracy, security and the indivisibility of all the states of that community.
Just two years later, in 2004, six more countries joined the North Atlantic Alliance, two weeks after Putin’s first re-election, including the three Baltic republics that were part of the Soviet Union. It was the fifth enlargement of NATO since its founding in 1949 and the most recent, the tenth, occurred last March with the incorporation of Sweden.
The US National Security Archive declassified 18 secret documents this week that provide previously unseen information on how NATO enlargement in the 1990s was planned and Russia’s response. Due to space limitations, it is impossible to summarize them all, but it is worth highlighting part of the conversation between the presidents of Russia and the United States on March 21, 1997.
Two months before burying the cold WarBoris Yeltsin told Bill Clinton: Our position has not changed. NATO’s expansion to the east is a mistake. I will sign the Founding Act with NATO (on May 27) not because I want to, but because it is an obligatory step. At the moment there is no other solution..
Clinton rejected Yeltsin’s request not to expand NATO eastwards, and expansion began in 1999.
