In April 2009, Mikhail Gorbachev expressed his outrage at the way Russia had been hoodwinked by the west in the years following German unification in 1990. After all, he told the German tabloid Bild, the western powers had pledged that “Nato would not move a centimetre to the east”. The failure to honour this commitment had poisoned Russia’s post-cold war relations with the west. “They probably rubbed their hands, rejoicing at having played a trick on the Russians,” he said.

The west’s assurances to Soviet ministers on eastward expansion of Nato | Letters Read more

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, agrees. At the Munich security conference in 2007, he pointed to the threat posed by Nato’s expansion and asked: “What happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?” In March 2014 he repeated the accusation that “they [the west] have lied to us many times, made decisions behind our backs ... This has happened with Nato’s expansion to the east.”

Is there any truth in this charge? Did the Nato partners offer a binding commitment to abstain from expansion into eastern Europe, and then renege on it?

In recent years, the bitterness of the Russian political elite against the west has been anchored above all in a sense of having been cheated by an unscrupulous opponent prepared to break international guarantees. But the memory of Nato’s broken promises also matters because it touches on the legitimacy, in Russian eyes, of the international settlement established during the German unification process and the European order that emerged in its wake. It has become one of the Putin government’s central arguments in the current Ukrainian crisis.

To assess this, we can consider an earlier moment of international crisis when the Russian political leadership claimed to have been duped. In 1908 the Russian minister of foreign affairs, Alexander Izvolski, hoped to secure improved terms of access to the Turkish Straits for Russian shipping. Since he had just signed a convention with Britain in the previous year, he was confident that London would back his efforts. But Austria-Hungary, Russia’s rival on the Balkan peninsula, was another matter.

In order to win Vienna’s support, Izvolski proposed that Austria annex the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Austria agreed. But the somewhat shady deal left open the question of when exactly the Austrians would take their share. Fearing that the British might not be keen on opening the Straits to the Russians, Austria moved faster than expected and announced the annexation. London refused to back Izvolski’s bid for the straits, and the Russians were left empty-handed. Izvolski had drastically miscalculated: he had handed Bosnia-Herzegovina to Austria but got nothing in return.

Rather than acknowledge his own part in this debacle, Izvolski simply denied that there had been any agreement at all. The Russians, he claimed, had been robbed by Vienna. A storm of outrage broke across the Russian media, intensified by Slavophile fury fuelled by solidarity with orthodox, South Slav “little brothers” in the annexed provinces. A prolonged international crisis followed, during which Europe appeared to teeter on the edge of war. The crisis only came to an end months later, when Germany intervened on behalf of its Austrian ally and Izvolski backed down.

But the sense of outrage and humiliation within the Russian political elite persisted. In the political crises of the last years before the outbreak of war in 1914, the determination not to let Austria inflict further “humiliations” became a powerful Russian argument against compromise.

In recent years, the tendency to misremember past debacles as humiliations has emerged as one of the salient features of the Kremlin’s conduct of international affairs. Amid recriminations over US and western European interventions in Kosovo, Libya and Syria, the Russian leadership has begun to question the legitimacy of the international agreements on which the current European order is founded. Among these, the centrepiece is the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany of 12 September 1990, also known as the Two-plus-Four Treaty because it was signed by the two Germanys, plus the US, the Soviet Union, Britain and France.

Yet the claim that the negotiations towards this treaty included guarantees barring Nato from expansion into Eastern Europe is entirely unfounded. In the discussions leading to the treaty, the Russians never raised the question of Nato enlargement, other than in respect of the former East Germany. Regarding this territory, it was agreed that after Soviet troop withdrawals German forces assigned to Nato could be deployed there but foreign Nato forces and nuclear weapons systems could not. There was no commitment to abstain in future from eastern Nato enlargement.

Vladimir Putin sees the matter differently. Pledges were made and broken; the Russians were “lied to” by their western partners; security guarantees were breached. And this retrospective reframing of the foundational 1990 agreement has profound consequences for Moscow’s view of its obligations under the post-cold war order. In a landmark speech at the Munich security conference last month the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, cast doubt on the legitimacy of German unification, proposing – to the baffled amusement of his audience – that it was less “legal” than the “reunification” of the Crimea with Russia. His comments followed an instruction from Sergei Naryshkin, the Chairman of the State Duma, that Russia’s Parliamentary Committee on International Relations consider passing a resolution denouncing the “annexation of the German Democratic Republic by the Federal Republic of Germany”. Russia’s own role in fixing the terms of German unification was now erased from memory, replaced by a mythical sequence of unmediated aggressions whose ultimate purpose was to justify current Russian policy in the Ukraine.

Looking back on the turbulent history of the European system since 1990 and the subsequent and totally unforeseen implosion of the Soviet Union the following year, it is too easy to fault the Russians for failing to insure themselves against the possibility of eastern European states joining the Atlantic alliance. These developments belonged to a future that was not yet in sight.

In a recent interview, Gorbachev distanced himself from earlier statements to concede that no agreements had been breached. “The topic of Nato expansion was not discussed at all. It wasn’t brought up in those years.” And when the issue arose later, in the early 1990s, “Russia at first did not object.” Following the Duma allegations of “annexation” of East Germany by West Germany, Gorbachev protested, warning that “our appraisal of the past should not be based on today’s views”. Sadly, it seems likely that this warning and others like it will fall on deaf ears in the Kremlin.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union there have been challenges and power plays on both sides. But misframing the past as a narrative of deceptions, betrayals and humiliations is a profoundly dangerous move. Today, as in 1908, tales of Russian victimisation play potently to domestic opinion. But projected on to international politics, they place in question the entire fabric of treaties and settlements that make up the post-cold war order.

The miracle of 1990 is that one of the greatest transformations of the international system in human history was achieved without war, in a spirit of dialogue and cooperation. The then Soviet leadership played a crucial role in that peaceful transition. Let us hope that its Russian successors do not prove to be its undoing.