Was NATO Expansion a Broken Promise to Russia?

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00:00Those who play devil's advocate say that Russia was also guaranteed that NATO would never move one inch eastward

00:07and that this was kind of also breached in terms of honouring an agreement.

00:12What's your view on that perspective?

00:13Well, Ukraine's not a member of NATO.

00:15The only countries that have joined NATO are Sweden and Finland recently,

00:20and that was in response to Russia's aggression in Ukraine.

00:24Free nations can choose what they want to do in terms of their defence, their foreign policy.

00:32They cannot be dictated to by Moscow by a tyrant like Putin.

00:37Again, to play devil's advocate, if there was something, a similar parallel,

00:42with Russia putting weapons on any kind of territory it has near the USA, how would the reaction be there?

00:48Well, Russia has weapons pointed at London, at Washington, at L.A., at the other parts of Europe.

00:57It has troops along the borders with the Baltic states.

01:01So we don't need to be lectured by Russia about the threats to their neighbours.

01:05It's Russia that invaded Georgia in 2008.

01:09It's Russia that annexed Crimea in 2014.

01:12It's Russia that invaded Ukraine in 2022.

01:15So before people want to play devil's advocate, they better work out who the devil is in that particular equation.