NATO threats Russia?

On May 8, 2022 in his Victory Day address, Putin asserted:  NATO has created a threat directly at our borders. NATO has consistently extended eastward and thereby broken a promise not to do so.

Putin bases his statement primarily on one statement of former German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher of February 2, 1990. Together with his American homologue James A. Baker III at State Department in Washington in a hastily summoned press conference Genscher stated: “A united Germany should remain part of NATO but the territory which is now East Germany should not be part of the alliance’s military structure.”

He also declared that the two officials agreed that “there was no interest to extend NATO to the east.”

But exactly that happened: After 1999, 14 states applied for membership and were granted it unanimously: In 1999: Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic, in 2004: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania and in 2009: Romania, Lithuania and Croatia became NATO members. Between 2017 and 2020 Montenegro and North Macedonia were given membership status.

In Putin’s mind the United States coerced these states into NATO in order to attack Russia.  Nothing is wronger than that: They all had suffered cruelly under the Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union. They wanted at all price avoiding a repetition of slavery under Putin’s Russia. They chose protection under the umbrella of the alliance.

But Putin thinks that for former satellites of Russia free choice of alliance is treason. With his incursion into Ukraine he has begun to realize his dream of the glorious Soviet Union. He forges historic facts: He knows very well that the Genscher statements have never become official policy neither in U.S. nor in Germany. Only the respective parliaments and the leaders of government are entitled to declare such far-reaching state policy, thus Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President Georges W. Bush at that time.

When they learned about the mess their foreign ministers had caused they got quite angry. Kohl wrote to Genscher an official letter that that was not the position of the German government.

Later Thomas de Maiziere, German defense minister from 2011 to 13 stated: It cannot be that a German Foreign Minister divests forever Poland and the Baltic states of the right to choose which alliance they want to be part of.

Strong words on Genscher’s vague formulated statement that does not sound like a promise.

At the NATO summit at Bucharest in 2008, American President Bush and his national security adviser Condoleezza Rice offered “concrete NATO membership perspectives to Ukraine and Georgia.” But German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy deemed the risk of a Russian intervention too big. Thus the move was aborted.

On April 22 this year, Lithuania’s foreign minister Gabrielius Landsbergis opined: “I think that NATO at that time had lost the geo-strategic vision – its sense. And the question remains: Had they seriously reflected on the problem how to integrate Ukraine into NATO, very likely that would have avoided this war.”

My question is: Will the Philippine president strengthen Putin or will he support the sanctions against terrorist Russia in order to weaken him?

Erich Wannemacher