Let me rephrase that for you:
After the implosion of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, some Western politicians made a totally unnecessary concession by making a non-binding verbal promise - functionally equivalent to a flippant, off-the-cuff remark - to not expand NATO.
Why should anyone in the West have knelt down beside the still-twitching body of the moribund Soviet Union and made any such unnecessary "promise," I ask you?
Regards,
The chances of any soviet union rebirth and russia have been declared dead at least twice since 1992..... In 2000 when poland was brought into NATO and in 2015 when the World Bank Rescued the rubble from total collapse. 2013-2016 is the time period will be when we notice the change democrats being friendly and flexible to russia, a ton of Wall Street money was just plain vaporized by investment into Russia. The conventional means on getting that back was graft, graft in 2016 russia did not work, the rubble was not worth it. The swing to Ukraine happened when the BRICK (Brazil, Russia, India, China, Korea) funds went to a BUICK (Brazil, Ukraine, India, China, Korea) investment strategy to keep exposer to the former soviet states per the prospectus that merged Russia and Ukraine as one investment environment.
The reason the pro russia political lost favor is that any state that was closely tied to Russia was absolutely uninvestable because of the ruble crashed in 2015-2017, and 2018-2021 russia showed remarkable gains only because investors thought there was something there to recover.
I would say foreign investment is over in russia until putin is in a glass box like his comrades.