PRESS RELEASE

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New Declassified Documents Further Prove Western Promises to Russia Not To Move NATO Eastward

Dec. 12, 2017 (EIRNS)—A series of declassified documents were posted by George Washington University’s National Security Archive on Tuesday. According to the release summarizing the documents,

"U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous ‘not one inch eastward’ assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991."

Sputnik reports that it includes a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Bonn informing Washington that German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher had urged NATO to rule out an "expansion of its territory towards the east, i.e. moving it closer to the Soviet borders," and that Genscher also proposed excluding East Germany from NATO’s security umbrella after German reunification.