Its not a lie, IT WAS SAID IN NEGOTIATIONS, not written in a treaty. Russians didn't ask for it to be included in any treaty.
Not sure why you cannot understand the difference.
There never was a treaty signed with Cuba regards ending the Missile Crisis either.
There are many examples of where we make “promises” without a formal treaty.
When you have a head of the German state (Kohl), head of NATO (Woerner), head of the Department of State (J. Baker), and many other senior leaders agree that NATO will not expand East, and they make public statements to that effect, you can assume there is an understanding that this is the case.
In fact - even the @sshole who caused this war, knew that was the case: https://www.facebook.com/rishibagree/videos/1997-the-only-thing-that-could-provoke-a-vigorous-and-hostile-russian-response-w/1131428724346357/ (He knew!)
Speculation: That was Biden’s position in 1997 and he was on the losing side of the argument. In 2004 the Balkan states did join NATO and there was no war. IMHO, he learned the wrong lesson and simply hoped Russia would acquiesce regards Ukraine and NATO.
We are not the good guys on this one.
I get as an American you want to defend our country - blind Patriotism.
Or maybe you just hate the Russians - blind hatred.
But blind anything tends to not get you to the truth.
This is a case where (1) We lied and (2) we put the Russians in a position where if it were us, we would do the exact same thing.
When we started getting serious about Ukraine being in NATO, we were pushing for something which both in terms of conventional and nuclear threat for Russia, impacts them adversely.
We will not accept Iran having nukes on the other side of the planet, but we expect Russia to accept them on their border, if we so choose. We expect Russia to accept our troops, tanks, fighters, bombers, missiles, missile defense, to be permanently stationed, in any number, on their border. What is our reaction when the Solomon Islands wants to host a Chinese naval base 6,000 miles from our South-Western coast in the Pacific? What was our reaction when the Soviets wanted to base missiles in Cuba and we have 90 miles of water between us?
Ukraine in NATO is a serious security issue for Russia, and some want to hand-waive that way. This shifts the entire nuclear deterrence model in our favor! Russia has practically no early warning (6 minutes with a modern hyper-sonic) and with missile defense going after Russian missile in their boost phase (must vulnerable) we can significantly degrade their retaliation.
This is a case where Western economic and political interests collided with Russia’s security interests, and we chose to ignore Russia and in fact tried to steam roll them (speed things up and ram it down their throat).
Pretending this is about Ukraine being “sovereign” or “Russian aggression,” “a Russian unprovoked attack,” are rhetorical arguments. Words themselves are the argument.
Claiming we didn’t tell the Russians repeatedly, by numerous officials, over several years, that we would not expand NATO Eastward is more of the same, games with words where 40 years later we want to pretend we didn’t say these things, or meant it all differently, or it’s not official... Bullshit-