For those commenters who buy into the various Russian "humiliation myths" this should actually end the discussion on NATO alleged "eastward expansion".

Gorbachev Confirms There Was No NATO 'Non-Expansion' Pledge

23:15 (GMT)

Russia Behind the Headlines, an English-language news site sponsored by the state-run Rossiyskaya Gazeta, ran an interview with the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in which he refutes a common Kremlin propaganda claim about NATO expansion.

Taking their cue from Russian leaders, the pro-Kremlin propaganda outlet globalresearch.ca (Centre for Research on Globalization) has repeatedly published claims that Western leaders "lied" about plans for NATO, and even historians have interpreted Gorbachev's own memoirs to imply the West broke its promise to Moscow. Putin even blamed the forcible annexation of the Crimea on "NATO enlargement."

This interview shows why we're fortunate such a historical actor is still alive to explain what happened when the Berlin wall fell 25 years ago.

RBTH: One of the key issues that has arisen in connection with the events in Ukraine is NATO expansion into the East. Do you get the feeling that your Western partners lied to you when they were developing their future plans in Eastern Europe? Why didn’t you insist that the promises made to you – particularly U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s promise that NATO would not expand into the East – be legally encoded? I will quote Baker: “NATO will not move one inch further east.”

M.G.: The topic of “NATO expansion” was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact was terminated in 1991. Western leaders didn’t bring it up, either. Another issue we brought up was discussed: making sure that NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces from the alliance would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification. Baker’s statement was made in that context, mentioned in our question. Kohl and [German Vice Chancellor Hans-Dietrich] Genscher talked about it.

Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done. And fulfilled. The agreement on a final settlement with Germany said that no new military structures would be created in the eastern part of the country; no additional troops would be deployed; no weapons of mass destruction would be placed there. It has been obeyed all these years. So don’t portray Gorbachev and the then-Soviet authorities as naïve people who were wrapped around the West’s finger. If there was naïveté, it was later, when the issue arose. Russia did not object at the beginning.

The decision for the U.S. and its allies to expand NATO into the east was decisively made in 1993. I called this a big mistake from the very beginning. It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990. With regards to Germany, they were legally enshrined and are obeyed.

The idea of "NATO expansion" as a trigger for Russian aggression is a popular one for analysts keen to blame the West for the war in Ukraine, explain Russian alienation, claim the US has treated Russia like a loser, or find something the West can change instead of demanding change from Moscow.

Gorbachev's remarks make it clear that there weren't promises made, that some aspects of the discussion only concerned Germany, and that at best we can really only argue about the violation of "a spirit" not a letter.

Anna Applebaum dispenses with these claims in a piece titled "The Myth of Russian Humiliation" in the Washington Post in which she covers the joining of both EU and NATO by Central and East European nations:

These two “expansions,” which were parallel but not identical (some countries are members of one organization but not the other), were transformative because they were not direct leaps, as the word “expansion” implies, but slow negotiations. Before joining NATO, each country had to establish civilian control of its army. Before joining the European Union, each adopted laws on trade, judiciary, human rights. As a result, they became democracies. This was “democracy promotion” working as it never has before or since.

But times change, and the miraculous transformation of a historically unstable region became a humdrum reality. Instead of celebrating this achievement on the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is now fashionable to opine that this expansion, and of NATO in particular, was mistaken. This project is incorrectly “remembered” as the result of American “triumphalism” that somehow humiliated Russia by bringing Western institutions into its rickety neighborhood. This thesis is usually based on revisionist history promoted by the current Russian regime — and it is wrong.

For the record: No treaties prohibiting NATO expansion were ever signed with Russia. No promises were broken. Nor did the impetus for NATO expansion come from a “triumphalist” Washington. On the contrary, Poland’s first efforts to apply in 1992 were rebuffed. I well remember the angry reaction of the U.S. ambassador to Warsaw at the time. But Poland and others persisted, precisely because they were already seeing signs of the Russian revanchism to come.

Indeed, Russia would be hard put to explain why the decision from the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, where Georgia and Ukraine were not given invitations or Membership Action Plan, due to opposition from Russia, Germany and France, and a decision by President Barack Obama not to deploy missiles in Czech Republic and Poland, prior to the reset, could somehow explain aggression against Ukraine 6 years later in 2014.