Name: What Russia Doesn’t Want You to Know About Your History
Uploaded: 2026-02-04T17:14:48.000Z
Duration: 38 min 54 s
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Throughout Russia's years long invasion of Ukraine, a central justification made by the Russian side in the war for having invaded Ukraine in the first place has been the expansion of the NATO military alliance right up towards Russia's borders over the years since the end of the Cold War.

Adverbs of degree

The Kremlin currently insists that in 1990, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, NATO and Western officials allegedly made assurances to Moscow that NATO would never expand a single inch forward to the east in the new world that was emerging in Europe.

But over the years that followed, the Kremlin argues that NATO then betrayed Russia and went back on their word by admitting Poland, Czechia and Hungary into the alliance in 1999, followed by Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria in 2004, and

their subsequent guarantees towards both Georgia and Ukraine towards future membership in the alliance that was extended in 2008, which in the Kremlin's argument, finally crossed Russia's red lines and supposedly forced them into acting militarily in order to avoid becoming encircled by NATO.

This argument made by the Kremlin that the west supposedly betrayed them and broke their promises made in the early 1990s has become the foundation for Russia's justification behind their brutal ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

And the Russian government uses that argument to shift the blame for the unimaginable horrors that they're inflicting upon Ukraine onto the Western world instead.

And in this video, I want to take the time to explain why NATO actually enlarged towards Russia's borders in the aftermath of the Cold War.

Why Russia's current arguments blaming the war on NATO's expansion don't hold as much water as you might think.

And I want to explain all of this primarily from the perspective of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe themselves, who each decided to join NATO voluntarily of their own accord, for their own strategic reasons in the later 1990s and the early 2000s.

Back in November of 1989, the Berlin Wall had just collapsed in Germany, and

the prospect of Germany reunifying again between east and west for the first time in 45 years had suddenly become a unexpected geopolitical possibility.

In the weeks and months that followed, intense negotiations began between the United States, the Soviet Union, the European states and the two Germanies on what German reunification might end up looking like.

There were, in theory, only two practical possibilities that could be foreseen at the time.

East Germany would either be absorbed into West Germany and by extension, East Germany's territory would be subsued into the NATO alliance.

That West Germany was already a part of or East Germany would be absorbed into West Germany, and

the new unified Germany would become a neutral state, neither in NATO nor in the Warsaw Pact in the center of Europe.

The neutral option, however, was sharply rejected by European states like France and the UK who feared what a united and powerful Germany outside of NATO in the core of Europe would mean for the future.

In light of Germany's militant past, they argued at the time that in order to keep Germany democratic and invested in European unity and stability, all of Germany needed to be fully incorporated into European institutions like NATO and could not be left neutral on their own.

And so the US ultimately agreed with that viewpoint and pressed on with negotiations with the Soviets to accept NATO enlargement to encompass East Germany's territory.

After the reunification process was completed.

Only three months after the Berlin Wall had collapsed In February of 1990, then US Secretary of State James A.

Baker and his West German counterpart Hans Dietrich Gensler, met with the Soviet Union's leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, to discuss status of a reunified Germany would look like in the future.

During that meeting, archival evidence suggests that Baker offered a verbal assurance to Gorbachev that in the event of the United States maintaining its military presence in a future unified Germany within the framework of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO's jurisdiction or military presence by a single inch in the Eastern direction.

To some, this statement could be interpreted as Baker promising that NATO would not expand eastwards from West Germany to encompass the territory of East Germany or potentially any further east into Europe as well.

And a few months later, In May of 1990, the then Secretary General of NATO, Manfred Warner, echoed similar assurances regarding eastward NATO enlargement verbally during a speech in Brussels.

Similar verbal assurances were made by other high ranking US and Western officials to Soviet leaders during this early period of negotiations.

But at around the same time, the US National Security Council also suggested that the idea of keeping the former East Germany out of NATO within the context of a unified Germany was going to be an unworkable idea and practice.

And so they quickly clarified that Baker's comments only meant that NATO troops themselves wouldn't be deployed any further east into the former East Germany from their current positions in West Germany after reunification.

While territorially East Germany would be fully within the legal coverage of the alliance, none of these verbal assurances were ever formally written down on paper into a treaty.

And as the negotiations continued to evolve and moved on through the rest of the year in 1990, those early verbal assurances and ideas were steadily dropped.

With time months later, In September of 1990, the negotiations finally culminated with a treaty on the final settlement with respect to Germany, which the Soviet Union signed and which recognized that eastern Germany would be fully incorporated into West Germany, including its membership in NATO.

While NATO agreed that they wouldn't construct any permanent military bases in the former East Germany or station any nuclear weapons there, nothing in that treaty was ever mentioned about the prospect of NATO membership being expanded anywhere else in Europe or what that might even look like.

Largely because at the time it was signed In September of 1990, the idea of NATO membership expanding to any other country further east than Germany was rather inconceivable because they were all still members of the Soviet led Warsaw Pact and many of them still had tens of thousands of Soviet troops deployed to their territories like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.

Nobody at that time on either side of the negotiations could have known that within just over a year's time in the future the Warsaw Pact would dissolve and then the Soviet Union itself would catastrophically, catastrophically collapse.

And so at the time, in 1990, no written guarantees were ever made on the potential enlargement of NATO into any of these other states.

And it's questionable if any serious discussions about that possibility were even made through 1990.

So in October of 1990, Germany reunified.

NATO was extended to cover the former East Germany's territory, but

without the presence of any NATO troops deployed there.

And the Soviet Union's internal collapse began rapidly accelerating in often violent fashion.

All three of the Baltic states had unilaterally declared their independence from the Soviet Union in 1990, but

they initially went largely unrecognized and even Mikhail Gorbachev was unwilling to accept their loss.

Soviet troops were deployed into Lithuania in January of 1991 to try and restore the Kremlin's authority there, which led to a violent confrontation that saw 14 Lithuanian civilians killed by the Soviet soldiers and more than 700 others injured before the Soviets decided to withdraw.

While around the same time Soviet troops in neighboring Latvia attacked the Latvian Ministry of the Interior in the capital of Riga.

That also ultimately resulted in the tragic deaths of six Latvians as well, all of which turbocharged the support of the Baltic states for their independence from Moscow.

The Warsaw Pact alliance was finally dissolved between February and July of 1991, and

the tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers deployed in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary began their process of withdrawal, which in the case of Poland was not completed for two more years until 1993.

By early August of 1991, with the Warsaw Pact dissolved and Germany reunified.

The Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Georgia, and

Armenia had all already declared their independence, while Gorbachev attempted to salvage what was left of the Soviet Union with a new treaty that would have converted the country into a less centralized federal system.

All of the remaining nine Soviet republics who had not already declared their independence approved of the new treaty, except for Ukraine, who was very hesitant about it.

And then a group of Communist Party hardliners launched a coup d' etat the day before the treaty was supposed to be signed, in order to prevent it from going into force and to restore the Kremlin's authority over all of the republics.

The coup collapsed after only two days, but

it was still enough to convince Ukraine that Moscow couldn't be trusted.

And so Ukraine declared its own independence just a couple of days later, after the coup had ended.

And with that, the Soviet Union was effectively doomed, and

the entire country would be dissolved altogether within only a few more months by December of 1991.

At this moment, at the very end of 1991, the Russian Empire in both its czarist and Communist varieties, had collapsed twice during the 20th century.

And all of the nervous, freshly independent states of Central and Eastern Europe at the end of 1991 looked back to the precedent of what had happened historically.

The last time the tsarist version of the Russian empire had collapsed, in 1917, when that happened for a brief moment in time, the chaos of the empire's collapse also resulted in a brief window of opportunity for the smaller nations, who had been occupied by the Russians for centuries, to secure their independence before the Russians could regain their strength again and take them back.

Within a year of the imperial collapse, by 1918, Russia was enveloped within a civil war, while Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and

the Muslim region of the North Caucasus, including Chechnya, had all declared their independence from Russia.

But after the Bolsheviks began emerging victorious in the Russian Civil War, the Soviet Russians invaded and reconquered Chechnya, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, and

Belarus, all by 1922, when they proclaimed the creation of the Soviet Union.

But they had also attempted to conquer the Baltic states and Poland during this early period as well.

By August of 1920, the Soviet Russians had invaded and successfully occupied about half of Poland and were at the gates of Warsaw itself, with victory appearing imminent.

But then they were unexpectedly and decisively defeated by the Poles at Warsaw.

The whole tide of the war changed after that, and

the Poles managed to push the Russians further back until a peace treaty was signed between them.

In 1921 that established Poland's inner war borders and which also secured Poland's independence from Russia for the first time in the past 126 years.

Since the Polish state was extinguished by the Russians all the way back in 1795.

And in their fight for independence against the Russians between 1919 and 1921, around 50,000 Poles paid for it with their lives.

And unfortunately for Poland, it would only be the first war.

They would fight against Russia for their independence during the 20th century and they would ultimately lose the second war.

Only 18 years after Poland and the Soviet Union ended their first war, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany agreed on the infamous Molotov Ribbentrop Pact.

In August of 1930, the divided Eastern Europe between their own spheres of influence.

Within weeks of the pact being signed, Germany invaded Poland from the west.

And shortly after the Soviet Union invaded Poland once again from the east.

The Soviets then annexed the eastern territories of Poland.

They conquered into the Soviet republics of Belarus and Ukraine, which remain to this day.

A few months later, In November of 1939, the Soviets launched another all out invasion into Finland with the initial goal of conquering the entire country and absorbing it back into the red version of the Russian Empire.

But after they suffered enormous casualties in Finland and failed to make significant advances, they settled with forcing Finland into ceding about 10% of their territory over to Russia instead, which also remains Russian to this day.

And nearly 26,000 Finns were killed during the invasion.

And then a few months after their invasions of Finland and Poland, the Soviets invaded and conquered all three of the Baltic states over the summer of 1940 and forcefully annexed them directly as constituent republics into the Soviet Union.

And they also threatened Romania with a further invasion unless they agreed to surrender over the territory of Bessarabia, which the Romanians only agreed to do under the immense threat of war if they did not, which then essentially became the Soviet Republic of Moldova.

All of these Soviet invasions between 1939 and 1940 were launched into former territories of the Tsarist Russian Empire who had achieved and secured their independence over the previous 22 years since the collapse of 1917.

Then after Nazi Germany betrayed the Soviet Union and invaded them in 1941, the Soviets eventually managed to defeat them and push them all the way back to Berlin by 1945.

And in the process, the Soviet Red army found its troops in control over most of Eastern Europe.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Soviet Union re annexed Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania against their wills, annexed the former German territory of Konigsberg that They renamed to Kaliningrad and forcefully imposed puppet communist regimes loyal to the Kremlin and the states.

Their army came to occupy from Bulgaria to Romania, to Hungary, to Czechoslovakia to Poland and to East Germany, which eventually became the members of the Soviet led Warsaw Pact.

And when some of these states attempted to resist their occupation by the Soviet Russian Empire, they were met with extreme violence.

In 1956 when the Hungarians rose up in a mass revolution against their Soviet installed puppet government, the Soviet army that was deployed to Hungary responded with an overwhelming crackdown that killed as many as 3,000 Hungarians and resulted in almost a quarter of a million Hungarians fleeing the country as exiles.

Then, a little more than a decade later in 1968, when the government of Czechoslovakia attempted to liberalize and moderate its harsh Soviet imposed communist regime, the Soviet Union led the Warsaw Pact into an all out massive invasion of the country with half a million soldiers to crush the reforms that killed 137 people in the country and seriously injured another 500 or so others.

All of this historical context of how Russia reacted after the first collapse of its empire in 1917, with all of its subsequent attempts to forcibly reconquer the territories it felt it had lost, heavily influenced the deep suspicions of the states of Central and Eastern Europe who emerged independent again after the second collapse in 1991.

They almost all universally feared that given enough time, Russia would one day regain its strength, its power and its confidence and come for them again, just like they did after the first collapse in 1917.

Especially in light of the fact that the Russian armed forces didn't even complete their withdrawal from Poland until 1993, and

they didn't complete their withdrawal from the Baltic states until 1994.

Many of them quickly came to see that their biggest guarantee of security from a revisionist Russia in the future that they didn't have between 1917 and 1940 would be by acquiring their membership in NATO and through it the extremely valuable Article 5 security guarantee that asserts that an armed attack on one NATO member state is an armed attack against all of them, including the post Cold War sole remaining global superpower, the United States.

And then Russia almost immediately started doing things in the 1990s that appeared to confirm the suspicions of the Central and Eastern Europeans that Russia was going to attempt and rebuild its lost empire again, just like they did after 1917.