‘Major Political Error’: Moscow Warned About NATO Expansion in 2001, Declassified Docs Reveal

In the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration broke with its predecessor’s pledge to Moscow not to expand the Western military alliance “one inch east” of a reunified Germany. Three decades on, relations between Russia and the West are perhaps worse than they ever were even in the darkest days of the Cold War.

In 2001, riding off the post-Cold War high of lofty promises to Russia about integration into the ‘civilized world’ and seeking to maintain good relations with its newfound Western partners, Moscow carefully sought to warn NATO about the implications of the alliance’s continued eastward expansion. That’s according to British government documents released by the National Archives on Friday.

The files, which include Cabinet Office papers of the Tony Blair government from the period between 2000 and 2002, featured a remark by then-Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev that continued NATO enlargement to the east would be a “major political error,” and that Moscow would be forced to “take appropriate steps.”

By that point, NATO had already swallowed up former Warsaw Pact members Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, and was negotiating expanding into Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia and the Baltic states, which would put the bloc’s strategic reach to within just 100 km of St. Petersburg, Russia’s second city.

A 2001 security paper drawn up for Blair defense advisor John Sawers chided Russian officials for their “obstructionist stance.” UK officials appeared to dismiss then fresh-faced Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assurances to Blair that he did not want to be seen as “anti-NATO,” and that he “would not try to slow down the process of NATO enlargement,” as disingenuous.

The security paper suggested that Putin’s “constructive” statements were “belied” by Russian espionage efforts against the UK, as well as Moscow’s links to Iran and Iraq.

“Despite the warmth of Putin’s rhetoric about the close links between Russia and the UK, the Russian intelligence effort against British targets remains at a high level. The Russian intelligence presence in the UK is at Cold War levels, and they continue to post active and hostile officers to work against British interests worldwide,” the document said.

Defense Minister Sergeyev did not shy away from expressing concerns about NATO expansion, both in private and in public. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the marshal repeatedly criticized the Western bloc over the “lack of trust” with Russia in the framework of the alliance’s ‘peacekeeping’ operations in Kosovo after its 78-day bombardment of Yugoslavia. At a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council in 2000, Sergeyev warned of the dangers of Washington’s plans to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which he characterized as a cornerstone of global strategic stability. Sergeyev called on Europeans to scrap NATO and create a “pan-European system of collective security” without the United States. The marshal also criticized the use of NATO forces in Kosovo without United Nations and Organization for Security Co-operation approval, saying this undermined the global post-Cold War security architecture.

The National Archives document dump also revealed UK efforts to keep up diplomatic decorum, befriend Putin and pull the wool over his eyes on the West’s friendship with Russia. In a memo dated February 2001, Blair proposed to US Vice President Dick Cheney that Putin be granted a “position [at] the top table” and encouraged “to reach for Western attitudes as well as the Western economic model.” Blair recommended “treating [Putin] with some respect while preventing him from pulling European members of the [NATO] alliance away from the US.”

Blair compared Putin’s “mindset” to that of the late French President Charles de Gaulle, describing him “as a Russian patriot, acutely aware that Russia had lost its place in the world.”

The docs revealed that Blair had symbolically gifted Putin a pair of special No 10 cufflinks in October 2001 for the Russian president’s birthday, with Putin ‘honored’ as the first non-British leader recipient of the trinket. The same year, Putin was said to have informed Blair that Russia was ready to help ensure Britain’s energy security “for decades to come” through the construction of a new gas pipeline via Belarus.

Western distrust over Russia’s intentions and the NATO push to incorporate more and more Eastern European members in the bloc underscored its underlying hostility to Moscow, notwithstanding the supposed end of the Cold War. Putin sought to test the authenticity of Western intentions in the year 2000, recalling to that he once proposed to outgoing President Bill Clinton that Russia itself join NATO.

“I remember one of our last meetings with President Clinton in Moscow. During the meeting I said, ‘we should consider an option that Russia might join NATO’. Clinton replied, ‘Why not?’ But the US delegation got very nervous,” Putin recalled, speaking to US filmmaker Oliver Stone in 2017.

Putin’s strategy echoed the approach taken by Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, who asked to join NATO in 1954 in a test of the West’s strategic intentions vis-à-vis Moscow. The alliance turned the Soviet offer down, prompting Moscow to form the Warsaw Pact alliance a year later. That alliance helped to guarantee European security for the next three-and-a-half decades.

NATO expansion is one of the central causes of the current crisis in relations between Russia and the West, including the ongoing conflict in Ukraine -amid the bloc's attempts to drag Kiev into the alliance. Russia has expressed concerns that the alliance’s conventional military forces, plus the missile defense systems placed in Poland and Romania, are designed to target Russia, threatening the country and undermining global strategic stability.

In December 2021, Russia proposed a twin set of draft security treaties to the United States and NATO. The proposals were designed to reduce tensions between Moscow and the Western bloc, and included a pitch not to deploy troops, military equipment, warships, missile systems and aircraft in areas where they might be seen as a threat to the other party, and a formal commitment by both sides that they do not see one another as adversaries. Moscow also asked Washington not to continue NATO’s eastward expansion, including into Ukraine and Georgia. The Western bloc rejected Russia’s proposals in January, citing its unwavering “open door” policy. Several weeks later, the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics reported an unprecedented increase in Ukrainian shelling and sabotage attacks of their territories, and, fearing that Kiev may be preparing a full-scale invasion, began an evacuation of civilians to Russia. Moscow responded by kicking off its special military operation to ‘demilitarize’ and ‘de-Nazify’ its neighbor.

George Kennan, venerated US diplomat, geostrategist and author of the famous 1946 ‘long telegram’ of advice on how to ‘contain’ the USSR in the first years of the Cold War, famously characterized NATO’s decision in the 1990s to expand as “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” The decision, he said, would severely undermine the fledgling trust between Moscow and Washington, and “impel Russian foreign policy in directions not to our liking.” Twenty-five years on, Kennan’s warning has proven prophetic.