Comments by "" (@RedXlV) on "30 years ago today: Kissinger on Russia u0026 NATO expansion Dec. 5, 1994 PBS Newshour, w/ Jack Matlock" video.

@gwopgetta2091 There was no 2014 coup, and Ukraine's government is not in any way a puppet government. It's democratically elected by the Ukrainian people. And Russia's policy cannot be justified at all. There is no such thing as "novorossiya oblasts", and as far as "the Russian people’s desires in the Donbas"? You're willfully ignoring the fact that only 1/3 of the Donbas population is Russian. Donbas never wanted to be annexed by Russia. Blatantly-fake referendums published by the invading Russian Army do not change that fact.
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@manilajohn0182 The did not discuss NATO expansion because nobody on either side of the table could even conceive of a scenario where NATO expansion could happen. It cannot be reiterated often enough that at the time of German reunification, the Warsaw Pact still existed. And obviously Warsaw Pact members were not going to seek NATO membership, or have it offered to them. It was only after the USSR fell and the Warsaw Pact was dissolved that anyone even thought about NATO membership for Eastern European nations. And contrary to the "broken promise" narrative you're pushing, the United States initially didn't want to allow Poland, Czechia, and Hungary (the first three to apply for NATO) to join. It was very difficult for those nations to convince the US to let them into NATO. Poland even resorted to threatening they'd acquire nuclear weapons if they weren't allowed to join NATO. They knew that Russia would not remain weak forever, and that once Russia thought they were strong enough, they'd seek to regain a "sphere of influence" over Eastern Europe.
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@serheyyavotsky1246 Chechnya has "always" been Russia? That's funny, because Russia only conquered it in 1859. Are you trying to pretend that Chechnya didn't exist at all until 165 years ago? And if Chechnya has always been Russia, why would Donbas have not always been Ukraine?
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@gwopgetta2091 No, the majority of the people in eastern Ukraine do not want unification with Russia. Speaking the Russian language does not make them pro-Russia. Hell, Zelenskyy speaks Russian as his first language.
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@StuardColins Denying that Russia wants to restore the Russian Empire is what makes no sense.
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@t6v5c2 No, he did not. The "promise" was only that NATO would not operate in the former East Germany. The question of whether other nations would be admitted into NATO was never even dicussed. Because at the time of those negotiations the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact still existed! Nobody in those negotiations had even the tiniest inkling that within a year, the Soviet Union would break up and the Warsaw Pact would be dissolved.
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@jessiejb4684 Kennan hated America and loved Russia. He had the delusional belief that Russia was a victim of the Soviet Union, rather than being the perpetrator of the Soviet Union. He wanted the US to become more like Russia, an autocratic state instead of a democracy.
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@SenyorCapitàCollons It's the exact opposite of that. It's Russia that's always looked for reasons to fight with the West. Because it's Russia that doesn't want friendly relations, it wants dominance over its neighbors.
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@gwopgetta2091 "Studies" by the Russian government.
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Correction: Jack Matlock is still alive, and still lying about such a promise ever having been made in the first place.
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@manilajohn0182 All of that was solely about Germany. Because, I repeat, the Soviet Union Warsaw Pact still existed at the time this pledge was made. Nobody was even thinking about Eastern European nations joining NATO, because they were all still Warsaw Pact members and nobody thought that was going to change. No one anticipated the Soviet Union collapsing in 1991. It was almost universally assumed that it would continue to exist for decades to come. (And ironically, the USSR might very well have lasted to the present day, albeit with some of its republics seceding, if the communist hardliners hadn't staged their coup attempt to prevent Gorbachev's plans to decentralize power.) As such, there wasn't a single person in those negotiations who would've even thought of Polish membership in NATO as a possibility, let alone something that the US would've needed to promise the USSR wouldn't happen.
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@manilajohn0182 It doesn't matter what they said. Neither of them had the authority to promise NATO would never "expand eastward", and both were talking solely about East Germany.
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@manilajohn0182 What the Soviets (remember, the USSR still existed in 1990) got in return was that NATO would not operate in the territory of the former East Germany. That's it. That's all that was promised. Period. And that promise has been kept even to this day. The only army that is ever deployed in the former East Germany is Germany's own. American military bases in Germany are all in the former West Germany. Nor do any of the other NATO member states ever deploy any troops in the former East Germany.
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