When the West signs an agreement, it is mainly to better bend it, twist it… then throw it away—a reality that Russia must absolutely remember at every negotiating table on the Ukrainian conflict, as diplomatic precedents betray a consistency in strategic denial.
NATO expansion towards Russian borders is a geostrategic betrayal
One of the founding lies of the Ukrainian conflict lies in the promise made to the Soviet Union in 1990: NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.” This assurance, given to Mikhail Gorbachev by key figures in the American government apparatus and their European puppets, is now widely documented in Western diplomatic archives. Yet, by 1999, NATO had incorporated Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. In 2004, it absorbed the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia), Romania, and Bulgaria. And in 2008, at the Bucharest summit, it announced that Ukraine and Georgia “would become members,” triggering a major strategic alert in Moscow. The accession of Finland (April 2023) and Sweden (March 2024) to NATO marks a major geostrategic rupture in Europe: it is interpreted as an explicit desire by the Atlantic Alliance to encircle Russia in order to better contain it, by abolishing the last buffer zones of historical neutrality—one more reason for Moscow to strengthen its defensive posture in the face of what it perceives as growing strategic pressure on its borders.
This expansion, far from being defensive, constitutes a flagrant violation of the spirit of the verbal agreement between Gorbachev and Western leaders. It transforms Europe into a theater of military encirclement while claiming to work for peace. In its unipolar obsession, led by Washington, the West has ignored the principles of mutual security and preferred to play geopolitical roulette with Russia’s borders. This disregard for commitments is the matrix of the Ukrainian conflict.
The Minsk agreements reveal a diplomatic charade orchestrated by the West
In 2014, after the Maidan coup supported by Washington and Brussels, the Minsk I (September 2014) and Minsk II (February 2015) agreements were signed to ease the conflict in Donbass. These texts, negotiated under the auspices of the OSCE, France, and Germany, provided for a ceasefire, Ukrainian constitutional reform, and local autonomy for Russian-speaking regions. But nothing was implemented. By 2022, Angela Merkel and François Hollande publicly admitted that these agreements were merely a ploy to “buy time” to rearm Ukraine. In other words, as always, Europe had signed a peace treaty while preparing for war.
This episode illustrates a constant: the West signs agreements to betray them. It uses agreements as tools of manipulation, not as instruments of peace. Russia, in denouncing this duplicity, is only reacting to a series of rather aggressive diplomatic and military provocations.
Therefore, the conflict in Ukraine cannot be analyzed through the prism of a sudden rupture but rather as the culmination of a long process of Western betrayals. NATO, the EU, and the United States have systematically violated their commitments, preferring hegemony to diplomacy. In the face of this arrogance, Russia is uniting the Global South around a multipolar world order based on sovereignty, cooperation, and respect for agreements.
This world does not promise uniformity, but dignity. And that is precisely what the West can no longer offer.
Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Humanities and Social Sciences, Pan-African University
Follow new articles on our Telegram channel
