Russian President Vladimir Putin claims that when Germany was reunited, Moscow was promised that NATO would not expand eastward. Ex-Finance Minister Theo Waigel disagrees.
Former German Finance Minister Theo Waigel disagrees with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s account of agreements on NATO’s eastward expansion.
“At the time, not a single word was spoken about expanding NATO,” said CSU honorary chairman Waigel of the “Augsburger Allgemeine” on the talks about German reunification. “In 1990 we only discussed the question of what was happening on the territory of the GDR.”
At that time, “all kinds of suggestions were on the table,” said Waigel. “For us, however, it was neither acceptable for Germany to become a neutral state nor for it to be part of both alliances, i.e. NATO and the Warsaw Pact that still existed at the time. That would have been absurd and Mikhail Gorbachev saw that too.”
In the run-up to the Ukraine war, Putin accused NATO of deceiving Moscow for years. When Germany was reunited in Soviet times, Russia was promised that NATO would not expand a bit to the east.
Source: Stern
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