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Except that article points out just how disingenuous Putin’s position is.

Baker’s pitch to Shevardnadze and Gorbachev was beyond retarded. It was as dumb as a stump.

He might as well have suggested that the Supreme Soviet admit publicly that it ALREADY couldn’t stop Poland from leaving the Warsaw Pact, joining the EEC, and applying for NATO membership... And was ALREADY dependent on the forbearance of the USA to even maintain the facade of the Kremlin still being able to hold the Iron Curtain up.

Putin cannot bring himself to believe that the USSR was that weak, even though Gorbachev himself confirmed it. The “not one inch” statement was never intended to bind the Warsaw Pact countries post independence; it was kabuki theater to make it look as if Poland needed Russia’s permission to leave the Warsaw Pact until the Soviet leaders could come up with a way to save face.

The minute the ink dried on the Belovezha Accords, the “not one inch” discussion was moot. The geopolitical reality of the end of the Soviet Union replaced the kabuki theater.

The very idea that ANY leaders in independent Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Russia even wanted to maintain the Warsaw Pact buffer zone let alone thought it necessary to keep the Krauts and Yanks out, is so daft that it’s on a par with resurrecting Bill Gates’ “640mb of ram should be good enough”.

But Putin had to have a Vranyo fiction to justify re-establishing Moscow’s domination of Kyiv, and so an inconsequential draft memo that no sane Soviet leader would ever have signed publicly is allowed to be pitched as relevant.

Putin relied on people being so anti government and anti socialism that they have forced themselves to ignore the fact that the “we were promised not one inch...” is a complete fiction, and pitching it at all after Gorbachev himself debunked it, is completely retarded flat-earth level bullcrap.