Sir, – Concerning President Putin's sabre-rattling over Ukraine, Gerard Toal writes that after the Cold War, Nato "decided to expand not disband" ("Delusion on all sides has paved way for Russia-Nato standoff", Opinion & Analysis, December 22nd).
But hundreds of memos, meeting minutes and transcripts released from US archives in 2017 tell a different story.
They show that President Gorbachev agreed to German unification within Nato as the result of a cascade of assurances that Nato’s jurisdiction or forces would not move eastward.
In a face-to-face meeting with President Gorbachev on February 9th, 1990, then US Secretary of State James Baker repeated the “not one inch eastward” formula three times.
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The decision to expand came later.
Currently, Nato officially recognises Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, and Ukraine as aspirant member states. – Yours, etc,
Dr JOHN DOHERTY,
Vienna.
Sir, – Prof Toal’s article on the reasons for Vladimir Putin’s military escalation along Ukraine’s eastern boarder is, at best, naive in its acceptance of the Kremlin’s latest narrative regarding Ukraine. Previous years saw the Kremlin promote a string of other reasons, before it settled recently on talking up how unfair things would be, if Ukraine were able to defend itself against further Russian military action as a member of Nato.
Prof Toal fails to note that the principal threat which Ukraine presents to the Kremlin is not military to start with, since Russia has already invaded Ukraine twice, seizing large tracts of its territory and directly violating the Budapest Memorandum while suffering trivial military losses.
On the contrary, Ukraine’s principal threat to the Kremlin is political, since the last thing Mr Putin wishes to see in Ukraine is a stable, free and democratic government, as that will inevitably suggest to the prodigiously talented Russian people that, but for Mr Putin and his friends, that they could be enjoying the same. – Yours, etc,
ROBIN HILLIARD,
Killiney,
Co Dublin.
Sir, – Before we are plunged into a senseless and potentially enormously destructive war in the Ukraine, could I call upon the great panjandrums of Nato to develop some degree of historical consciousness, and the balanced outlook that might follow from that. First of all, following on the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, Nato, which was formed to protect us against these, should logically have been dissolved as well. Instead, it progressively gobbled up all or most of the members of the Warsaw Pact, and has been constantly on the look-out to gobble up more – such as Georgia and the Ukraine.
Second, and more importantly, we need to realise that the Crimea is a traditional part of Russia, largely inhabited by ethnic Russians, only handed over to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954 by Mr Krushchev, in a moment of vodka-fuelled sentimentality (he was born in Kalinovka, quite near the Ukrainian border). When Mr Putin heard that the Western-leaning oligarchs who had taken over the Ukraine after the “Orange Revolution” of 2004 were offering the existing Russian naval base situated there to Nato, to give it a strategic foothold in the Black Sea, he took firm action. Similarly, the eastern, Donbas region of Ukraine is very largely Russian, being occupied by Russians brought in to work in the mines in the 19th century, and they do not wish to be cut off from Russia, as part of a Western-oriented Ukraine. Russia is quite justified in protecting them.
Now no one but his very close friends and associates could call Mr Putin a nice guy, but in this case I think it must be recognised that he has a case. What we have here is not an example of Russian aggression; it is one of arrogant, ignorant Nato and US expansionism; and as such it should be exposed and rejected. – Yours, etc,
JOHN DILLON,
Howth,
Dublin 13.