Yep. There’s never been any serious question about this. Russia was pretty much universally acknowledged as the successor state to the USSR for pretty much every international organization, regime, and treaty in existence. In particular, the United States has always regarded Russia as the successor state to the USSR for all of the treaties and agreements they have entered into. The U.S. has always considered itself to still be bound by those treaties and agreements and has always considered Russia to be bound by them as well. And so has Russia.
If there were a binding agreement between the U.S. and NATO on the one hand the USSR on the other, there’s absolutely no question that that agreement would have survived the dissolution of the USSR. The issue is that this “agreement” was never formally announced or documented, and American officials involved in the talks have always denied that any such agreement was ever made.
What I personally think probably happened is this:
U.S. and NATO officials went to some lengths to privately reassure Soviet officials that NATO had no current plans to expand, and that NATO wouldn’t be including any Warsaw Pact states in the foreseeable future. Soviet officials took that as a solemn agreement that NATO would never expand eastward. U.S. and NATO officials just thought they were offering anodyne reassurances as to the current situation.
Putin may have seriously believed that, but if so, he was wrong. NATO wasn’t going to invade Russia in a first strike, even if Ukraine had joined. MAD is still MAD, whether a NATO first strike has the tank convoy leaving from Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, or Kyiv.
Since the end of the Cold War, there have been a lot of very public arguments at pretty high levels in the West about what the purpose of NATO even was anymore, and even whether it should simply be abolished. Putin’s perception of NATO as an aggressive alliance aimed directly at Russia was a severe disconnect from the self-perception of civilian and military officials inside NATO.
My point in bringing up Putin’s perception of NATO wasn’t to argue that Putin has a masterful grasp of geostrategic affairs, or that his view of NATO is even plausible. It’s that it’s nothing new - it’s been his view for decades.
His perception of both the likelihood of NATO expansion to include Ukraine and of what sort of threat that would pose to Russia are deeply flawed. But they’ve always been deeply flawed. This isn’t a recent development.
His latest speech sounds more brazen than delusional, though either is a plausible description of the content:
Russian President Vladimir Putin called Friday for the “normalization” of relations with other states, saying Moscow has “absolutely no ill intentions with regard to our neighbors.”…
Russia (and China for that matter) are still basically blaming the US and NATO for all of this happening. We made them do all of this. They had no choice but to valiantly invade Ukraine to protect themselves from US and NATO…something.
Anyone who’s played enough Civ has had the AI effectively telling you “Change your relationship with this other civ or we’re at war.” Normally in the real world, of course, it doesn’t work that way. Relationships may be frosty or the dispute over the third country may be part of the relationship otherwise, but wars don’t happen. Putin sounds like one of those AIs, using a completely bogus reason to declare war.
If you don’t sit at a long table, it might affect the purity of your essence. Or something.
Putin’s speech in late February was uncharacteristically angry. But I can’t draw conclusions as to his health. Clearly he underestimated the response to his gamble.
Sound like the Nuclear Gandhi meme from Civilization. Allegedly the various leaders’ aggression score was an unsigned 8-bit integer and Gandhi’s already low score could flip from 00 to FF, 25x more aggressive than the most naturally aggressive leaders in the game.