The Foreign Service Journal, October 2022

28 OCTOBER 2022 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL always made clear that it is up to each European country to make its own decision about membership. But the eastward expan- sion of NATO particularly inflamed Putin, who has claimed that Secretary of State James Baker and other Western leaders assured Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, at the time a unified Germany joined NATO, that the alliance would expand “not one inch eastward.” George Kennan would surely have understood Putin’s reac- tion. The architect of the “containment” policy toward the Soviet Union wrote in 1997 that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post–Cold War era.” Kennan continued: “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the Cold War to East-West relations; and to impel Russian foreign policy in direc- tions decidedly not to our liking.” Kennan never convinced President Bill Clinton or his Russia adviser, Strobe Talbott. And the remarks of Secretary Baker or NATO leaders could be discounted because they were never part of a treaty or formal agreement. But Putin nevertheless claims that the West betrayed Russia in the post-Soviet period because much of Eastern Europe, in fact, joined NATO. And this is at least part of what motivates his aggression now. In any case, this putative betrayal does not carry the weight of a violation of a formal agreement, a violation of which Putin himself is guilty. By signing the Budapest Memorandumon Security Assur- ances in 1994, the Russian Federation promised not to threaten or use military force or economic coercion against Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. As a result of this and other agreements, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons and acceded to the Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear state. It is now paying the price for trusting Russia to honor its international commitments. Shift in Ukrainian Public Opinion During my tenure in Kyiv, State Department–sponsored public opinion polling never showed a majority of Ukrainian public Putin believes that Russia rightfully deserves a sphere of influence in its “near abroad.” “MENAGERIE,” BY MARIA PRIMACHENKO WIKIOO.ORG -THEENCYCLOPEDIAOFFINEARTS