At the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, eventual membership in NATO was promised to Ukraine and Georgia with the statement that “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agree today that these countries will become members of NATO.” Russian President Vladimir Putin “flew into a rage,” and, according to a Russian journalist quoted by John Mearsheimer, warned that “if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the eastern regions. It will simply fall apart.”
A decade and a half later, Putin sent the message to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: “Tell me you’re not joining NATO, I won’t invade.”
Putin is consistently accused in the West of dangerous melodrama and of historical revisionism when he points to NATO’s broken promise that it wouldn’t expand east if the Soviet Union permitted a united Germany to join NATO. Läs artikel