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Gorbachev himself clarified this. There was no such commitment sought by the USSR, and the American assurances pertained to East Germany specifically.

Reasons:

1. Assurances were given under the assumption that West and East East Germany might reunify but the Iron Curtain would remain intact. Russia’s orbit would still include the Baltics, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belarus and Ukraine.

2. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Iron Curtain collapsed and Russia’s border moved east, to the Belorussian and Ukrainian eastern borders. Yeltsin’s presidency ended the relevance of the American pledge.

Putin is open about how he feels the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest catastrophe in his lifetime and he wants to roll the clock back. Once you accept that, all other things make sense.

Why does he think the East Germany agreement is relevant to anything? Simple. He thinks the Iron Curtain should never have fallen, therefore it offended him the very first time NATO was approached by a Warsaw Pact country.

There’s nothing you can do to mollify Putin on that score. He’s totally irrational. He’s living in an alternative reality where the West stole all his Warsaw Pact toys and the UN made a horrible mistake recognising those countries as independent.

This is how irrational he us: all the Soviet Socialist Republics (including Russia and Ukraine) were granted equal recognition at the UN as independent nation states. But the same applies to the Commonwealth of Independent States. If you temind Putin of this inconvenient fact, you will be responsible for breaking the nearest seventh storey window.

Putin was rational in many respects but his outrage at the loss of influence over the Warsaw Pact region is compounded by him being KGB to the core. He’s never let it go. And now he’s gone “full Tonto” with his mortality exposed, he’s desperate to get into the history books by undoing a 30 year old mistake... Gorbachev and Yeltsin allowing the release of Eastern Europe from the tyranny of the USSR.