[Czech_Occidentalist]

And it was Putin who started this war.

[JonPreston]

“We understand that not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees,” then-US Secretary of State James Baker told Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. “If the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.”

Since that comment by Baker, 14 countries have been added to NATO’s membership list, most of them in Eastern Europe. As George Kennan, the original architect of US foreign policy in the Cold War, noted: “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error in American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”