I have a lot of Vatniks, and MAGA folks, posting this document, which is called a Memorandum of Conversation as proof for NATO providing Russia the casus belli for invading Ukraine in 2024 and again in 2022.
This is an official State Department document that is essentially a transcript of the verbal negotiations between then Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet leader Gorbachev from February 9, 1990.
These Vatniks focus on the sentence where it says "not once inch to the east" and show it as proof of some form of treachery and/or promises broken by NATO.
This is FALSE.
This document does not demonstrate any legally binding promise or treaty made to restrict NATO expansion eastward.
This document were the notes of a verbal hypothetical conversation between Baker and Gorbachev, where Baker was famously asking Gorbachev if he would prefer a united but independent Germany outside of NATO, or a united Germany aligned with NATO but with assurances that its jurisdiction would not move eastward.
Historians and the participants themselves, including Mikhail Gorbachev, have clarified that the phrase "one inch to the east" was spoken specifically in relation to the territory of the former East Germany. At the time, the Warsaw Pact still existed, and the broader enlargement of NATO to other Eastern European states was not a political reality or even under discussion.
This Memorandum of Conversation was only a record of what was said during the meeting, not a legally binding treaty.
The final, Two-Plus-Four Treaty, which settled the status of Germany, was signed in September 1990. That formal treaty, signed and ratified by the Soviet Union, only placed restrictions on the deployment of foreign NATO troops and nuclear weapons inside the territory of the former East Germany.
It contained absolutely NO restrictions or prohibitions on the future expansion of NATO to other sovereign nations.