Fact check: Did NATO expansion drive Russia to war? – DW – 06/25/2025

DW

6 hours ago

NATO has allegedly deceived and disrespected Russia by expanding into Eastern Europe, threatening Moscow's interests. That, at least, is how the Kremlin has justified its war in Ukraine. But is there any truth to it?
NATO leaders have gathered in The Hague in the Netherlands on June 24 and 25 to discuss the topic of increased defense spending, and support for Ukraine will be high on the the agenda.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is now well into its fourth year. As the fighting drags on, the United States has increasingly demanded that its NATO allies shoulder a greater share of the costs of funding the alliance, whose members have been providing significant military and financial support to Kyiv.
In the past four years, NATO has been a target of false narratives time and again. DW Fact Check looked at some of the most common claims.
However, for the Russian President Vladimir Putin, NATO itself represents a threat to Russian national security — especially since its post-Cold War expansion into Eastern Europe, which includes countries that had formerly been part of the Soviet Union or at least in the Soviet sphere of influence.
The prospect of Ukraine, a country with even stronger historical and cultural ties to Russia, drawing closer to or even joining NATO — or indeed the European Union — has been cited by Putin as justification for Russian interference in Ukraine since 2014 and the so-called "special military operation" launched in February 2022.
As early as March 2000, speaking to the BBC in one of his first interviews as Russian president, Putin insisted that he was not opposed to NATO but stressed concerns about the alliance's eastward expansion, which by that point had already seen Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic join as members.
Despite NATO's insistence that the alliance was purely defensive, Putin was not convinced. He considers the expansion a breach of trust in the wake of the so-called "Two Plus Four Agreement," the September 1990 settlement regulating the reunification of West and East Germany (the "two") and signed by the four allied powers which had occupied Germany at the end of World War II: the United States, the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union.
According to Putin, the Western powers had promised that NATO would not expand eastwards into territory formerly controlled by the Soviet Union. NATO has always denied this claim.
The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, or the Two Plus Four Agreement, made it clear that no foreign (meaning non-German) troops or nuclear weapons were to be permanently stationed on the territory of the former East Germany. But the German Interior Ministry states that the deal made "no binding assertions regarding the eastward expansion of NATO or the admission of other members."
But what informal promises and statements were made, what exactly they entailed and how they are to be interpreted has been the subject of heated debate among both politicians and historians ever since.
Speaking at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Putin quoted former NATO Secretary-General Manfred Wörner who said in a speech in Brussels in May 1990: "The fact alone that we are prepared not to station NATO forces beyond the borders of the Federal Republic [of Germany] gives the Soviet Union firm security guarantees."
As a 2016 German government position paper on the topic points out, however: "Neither in this speech nor at any other point did [Wörner] declare that there would be no eastward expansion of NATO."
For Putin and his allies, two other well-documented comments made by senior German and US politicians in February 1990 are of particular importance: former US Secretary of State James Baker's proposal to Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev of "assurances that NATO's jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position," and former West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher's commitment to a "non-expansion of NATO."
According to Tim Geiger of the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History, however, these words should not be taken out of context.
Writing on behalf of the German Armed Forces, the Bundeswehr, Geiger argues that Baker's and Genscher's suggestions merely serve to demonstrate the lengths to which the West German foreign ministry was willing to go at the time to accommodate Soviet concerns regarding German reunification, but had never constituted German or American foreign policy.
Indeed, he points out that, within two months, both US President George H. W. Bush and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had dismissed the ideas as unworkable since they contravened a country's right of freedom to select alliances.
This argument is also made by Jim Townsend, senior fellow at the CNAS Transatlantic Security Program, who worked both for and with NATO in various roles throughout the 1990s. "It was all about Germany and German unification," he told DW.
Gorbachev himself confirmed as much in an October 2014 interview in which he stated: "The topic of 'NATO expansion' was not discussed at all … Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn't bring it up, either."
But that's not enough for Joshua Shifrinson, associate professor of international politics at the University of Maryland, who told DW that Gorbachev's apparent rejection of Putin's theory has also been taken out of context.
Indeed, the former Soviet president also said in the same 2014 interview that the first eastward expansion of NATO in the 1990s was "a big mistake from the very beginning," and "definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990."
Among the sources analyzed by Shifrinson are the previously classified minutes of a meeting of the chief US, British, French and German ambassadors to NATO in March 1991, also reported by , in which the German representative Jürgen Chrobog said: "We had made it clear during the Two Plus Four negotiations that we would not extend NATO beyond the [River] Elbe. We could not therefore offer membership of NATO to Poland and the others."
According to the minutes of the meeting, photos of which DW has also seen, none of Chrobog's colleagues objected. Indeed, France's Raymond Seitz even added: "We had made it clear to the Soviet Union — in Two Plus Four and in other exchanges — that we would not take advantage of the Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe."
For Shifrinson, this is proof that NATO had not just committed to keeping foreign troops out of eastern Germany, but that "people were thinking about the future of Eastern Europe in general."
Benjamin Friedman, who also analyzes relations between Russia and NATO for the US think tank Defense Priorities, added: "The United States didn't make some solemn promise that we would never expand NATO, but we certainly gave the Russians that impression and I think that upset them."
Regardless of the ongoing debate, said Shifrinson, "it's incontrovertibly true that Russia invaded Ukraine. You can acknowledge that assurances were given and later abrogated and still not justify Russian behavior."
"The expansion or prospect of expansion [of NATO] to Ukraine was a huge cause, not the only one, but a huge cause of the war," said Friedman. "There's a difference between making a statement about causality and a statement about guilt or moral responsibility."
Townsend, who after stints at the Pentagon and NATO, moved to the Atlantic Council think tank, also sees Russia as the clear aggressor.
"We didn't do anything to upset the Russians, we were very careful about that, and they gave us the green light during those days," he said. "It wasn't until Putin's speech that he gave at the Munich Security Conference that they suddenly had a problem."
If NATO has made any mistake, in Townsend's mind, it's a very different one. "If there was any kind of actions that NATO took, [that might have destabilized the European security architecture], it was by not getting strong enough."