The expansion of the North Atlantic Alliance (NATO) served as a prerequisite for the start of the conflict in Ukraine, said during meetings UN Security Council former CIA analyst Raymond McGovern.
He recalled that with the Russian special operation regularly called “unprovoked” in the West, there was a significant prerequisite.
“We should remember the expansion of NATO, despite the fact that a promise was made not to do this,” he said.
McGovern told how he talked with Viktor Kuvaldin, adviser to the last head of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev, and tried to find out why the promise of non-expansion of NATO was not documented.
Kuvaldin replied to the CIA analyst that several factors prevented this, one of which was the reluctance of Germany and the existence of the Warsaw Pact.
In August 2022, Paul Roberts, a former White House official during the administration of former US President Ronald Reagan, explained that Washington had promised the first Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev not to expand NATO eastward, but he did not understand that the next American leader could backtrack on the statements of the previous one.
In June 2022, in an interview with Massachusetts Peace Action, the American historian, philosopher and linguist Noah Chomsky said that former US President Bill Clinton had broken his promise to Russia to abandon NATO expansion to the east. Chomsky noted that Clinton deceived the first president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, by saying that all his statements were designed for an “internal audience” and to achieve the presidency.
