Russia wants to receive written guarantees from NATO of non-expansion to the East

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia does not consider verbal assurances about NATO’s non-expansion to the East sufficient. According to him, such agreements should be officially enshrined in a document.

This is reported by Russian media.

Peskov claims that promises not to expand NATO eastward were made during the time of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Russia’s first president Boris Yeltsin. However, he says that the Alliance has expanded five or six more times since then.

“This was during the time of Gorbachev and Yeltsin. After that, NATO expanded to the East five or six times. Therefore, of course, behind such important words for us, there must be actions to, in fact, probably document the non-expansion of NATO,” the Kremlin spokesman said.