Germany said on Monday that agreements signed between Moscow, Berlin and other Western powers don’t contain any promises not to expand NATO.
It’s not the German Foreign Ministry’s job to interpret old historical documents Foreign Ministry spokesman Christopher Burger said at a briefing on Monday.
Last week, Spiegel published a formerly classified document retrieved from the British National Archives dated 1991 which showed that Western powers made an explicit commitment to Moscow not to expand the NATO alliance beyond the borders of a reunified Germany.
“I would like to state once again that neither the ‘2+4’ Agreement [on German reunification], nor the NATO-Russia Founding Act contained promises to Russia that NATO would not expand to the east. The ‘2+4’ Agreement does not mention this issue at all, and any statements to the contrary do not correspond to reality,” Burger said, when asked to comment on the Spiegel report.
“The NATO-Russia Founding Act was signed in 1997, precisely against the backdrop of the upcoming expansion of NATO eastward. In it, Russia and NATO reached an agreement on how certain Russian security interests can be taken into account in this process. We continue to stick to it today,” the spokesman added.
“I think that a government briefing, by definition, is not a historical commission. The Foreign Ministry has a political archive which everyone can access and study documents that are over 30 years old. Many historians use these archives. I will not try to interpret a thirty-year-old document. This is not our job,” Burger stressed.
Source: Agencies
