German political scientist of Romanian background Anneli Ute Gabanyi rebuts the propaganda of the Russian Federation, which shifts the whole blame for the war in Ukraine onto the U.S. The position is stated in an interview for adevărul.ro and is based on two irrefutable arguments: Gorbachev’s statements and the fact that the Cold War wasn’t declared officially by any of the sides and a peace agreement in which the Americans made empty promises couldn’t have beam concluded this way, IPN reports.
The Kremlin’s propagandists say the war in Ukraine wouldn’t have taken place if Washington had kept an old promise – that NATO will not be extended to such countries as Romania, Hungary or Poland – and hadn’t used Ukraine against Russia. In reality, the Americans have never made such promises, said the political scientist.
“The Cold War couldn’t have been ended by a peace accord as it hadn’t started with a war declaration. The mentioned agreement that intrigues Russia is the so-called «2 plus 4» agreement between the two German states, GFR and GDR, on the one side, and France, the Soviet Union, the UK, and the United States of America, on the other side. This agreement that was signed on September 12, 1990 in Moscow and took effect on March 15, 1991 opened the way for the reunification of Germany,” explained Anneli Ute Gabanyi.
Among the themes raised when debating the clauses of the accord was the enlargement of NATO - only on the territory of the former GDR, as most of the representatives of the Western powers at the debates assert, and on the territory of all the states of the Warsaw Pact, as former and current Soviet, respectively, Russian politicians assert.
Mikhail Gorbachev himself admitted that he didn’t discuss the issue with his Western counterparts. In an official statement, he clearly said that he didn’t insist that NATO should remain within its old borders and explained why. Later, Gorbachev’s successor Boris Yeltsin tried indeed to obtain from the U.S. the promise that NATO would not go beyond the borders of 1989, but unsuccessfully.
Anneli Ute Gabanyi said that in the Clinton Presidential Library, they recently found notes of the conversations between the two President and these show that Yeltsin presented a secret verbal agreement on the new division of Europe to Clinton: “He offered to Clinton in 1997 a «gentlemen’s agreement» according to which no post-Soviet state, «in particular Ukraine» should join NATO. Or at least «not during the next decade», or at least «not during the first wave of enlargement». In their last meeting, in 1999, Yeltsin asked of Clinton “One thing. Just give Europe to Russia”. Clinton surely didn’t accept those proposals”.
Later, Vladimir Putin, Yeltsin’s successor in 2000 accused the West in public for not respecting the alleged promise not to extend NATO to the East. Since 2014, Putin has more insistently banked on the narrative “Russia cheated by the West“ to legitimize the occupation of Crimea by Russia not only before the own citizens, but also before those from abroad, with particular success.
Anneli Ute Gabanyi reminded that before the launch of the attack on Ukraine, the Russian President went even further. On December 17, 2021, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia published a draft security treaty between the Russian Federation and the U.S. in which Moscow presented three principled proposals: further prevention of the enlargement of NATO, in particular in Ukraine; renouncing by NATO of the intention to base antimissile defense systems close to Russia’s borders, and the rolling back of the military capacity and infrastructure of NATO in Europe, up to the situation of 1997, when the NATO-Russia Founding Act was signed.
Anneli Ute Gabanyi headed the Romanian section of the Research Institute of Radio Free Europe based in Munich and is considered one of the most important German political scientists, but is also known as a philologist and literary critic.
