Declassified documents show how NATO tricked Russia

NATO expansion was a key issue as the US, Western European and Soviet leaders negotiated the reunification of Germany. Sputnik is reporting this on Wednesday.

The Russian broadcaster said that US and Western European leaders repeatedly promised their Soviet and Russian counterparts in the early 1990s that NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe, according to a series of declassified documents posted by George Washington University's National Security Archive on Tuesday.

A press release summarizing the document cache said that US 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...