six months and six days after the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine launched by the Russian army, last Tuesday, August 30, he died at the age of 91, Mikhail Gorbachevthe last Soviet Communist Party General Secretary and head of state who abdicated control of 290 million people. A massive farewell with the notorious deliberate absence of the Tsar Vladimir Putinwhich denied him a state funeral, took place yesterday in the Muscovite House of the Unions.
Putin, despite information from the US intelligence services and repeated warnings from US President Joe Biden, unleashed a warwhose devastating consequences were not in his calculations, given that his plan was that of a military parade after which a puppet would occupy the Mariyinsky Palace on the banks of the Dnieper River in kyiv. His trucks and tanks were unable, from the first weeks, to cross the 60 kilometers that separated them from the Ukrainian capital.
Obituaries have abounded, mostly laudatory of gorbyas he was affectionately called by the politicians who negotiated with him the reunification of germany in 1990 and who pledged one after another to stop any attempt to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the only military alliance to survive the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, the USSR-led alliance, with eight members and three observers, founded in 1955 and dissolved in 1991.
That liquidation, precisely, was preceded by the promises and commitments from Western politicians and militaries that NATO would not go from being a defensive organization to an aggressive one, now that the Warsaw pact o Treaty of Friendship, Collaboration and Mutual Assistance, had disappeared.
It was Robert Gates, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with President George HW Bush in 1991 and 1993, who uncovered, in July 2000, the double game of Western leaders, after the incorporation in 1999 of Poland, Hungary Y Czech Republic to NATO.
“They were led to believe”
In a lecture delivered at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for Oral History on July 14, 2000, Gates made an offhand criticism that in three lines said it all. Former CIA Director Attacked Those “Pushing NATO’s Eastward Expansion [de Europa] when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that this would not happen & rdquor ;.
In the second expansion, in 2004, NATO incorporated Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania. In the third, it was the turn of Albania and Croatia. And in early 2017, Montenegro joined, amid massive protests against its entry.
Precisely, in December 2017, the National Security Archive of the United States, (NSA in North American acronym), a non-governmental organization located at the George Washington University, in Washington DC, managed to declassify the secret documents of the conversations that Gorbachev had had with the main Western leaders and presidents in 1990, a dossier which he released under the title: “NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard & rdquor ;. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early#_edn1.
The declassified documents reflect the dialogue and negotiations that Gorbachev and the ministers of his team had with the Americans George H. W. Bush, James Baker Y Robert Gates; Germans Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Helmut Kohl, Manfred Worner, French President François Mitterrand, and the British Margaret Thatcher, Douglas Hurd Y John Major.
According to the NSA account, based on the declassified documents (see reproduction), “not once but three times did James Baker use the formula `not an inch east [de Europa]´ with Gorbachev at the meeting on February 9, 1990. Baker agreed with Gorbachev’s statement about the need to ensure that ‘NATO expansion is unacceptable’. The US Secretary of State assured Gorbachev that `neither the president [Bush padre] nor I seek to extract eventual unilateral advantages of the ongoing processes` and that the Americans understand that `not only for the Soviet Union but also for the other European countries it is important to have guarantees that if the United States maintains its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of present NATO military jurisdiction will spread eastward [de Europa]´”.
Margaret Thatcher, the Iron lady, received Gorbachev in London on June 8, 1990. As he explained to the Soviet leader, in early July, NATO would support him with an explanation of the new orientation of the military alliance towards a more political and less threatening bloc from the point of view of military view.
“We must find ways to give the Soviet Union confidence that their security will be guaranteed…the CSCE [Conferencia de Seguridad y Cooperación Europea] could be an umbrella for all this as well as the forum that fully incorporates the Soviet Union in the debate on the future of Europe & rdquor ;. John Major, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, later seconded Thatcher. “None of that will happen.” responded to the Soviet Defense Minister, Marshal Dmitry Yazov, when asked in March 1991 about the Eastern European countries interested in joining NATO. “We are not talking about strengthening the Atlantic alliance & rdquor ;.
Helmut Kohl, François Mitterrand, they all committed themselves to the formula of “not an inch” to Eastern Europe. NATO Secretary General Manfred Wörner told Soviet parliamentarians in Brussels in July 1991: “We must not allow the isolation of the USSR. The NATO Council and I are against expansion & rdquor ;.
This, then, was the context in which Mikhail Gorbachev, against his will, declared in December 1991, after the failed coup of August 1991 – a failure that Boris Yeltsin capitalized on as head of the Russian Federation – the end of the Soviet Union while ensuring that NATO would not expand to the east and therefore would not be a threat for your security.
Gorbachev, the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, made a statement in October 2019 when presenting a new memoir. “The decision that NATO took years later to expand undermined that trust that had arisen after the end of the cold war and Russia had to draw conclusions & rdquor ;, he explained.
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