Russia was going to join NATO in 1994. And the United States was ready to accept it. But Germany got in the way

Der Spiegel has found new documents shedding light on the origins of Moscow's conflict with the West.       

In the early 1990s, the administration of US President Bill Clinton seriously considered the possibility of Russia joining NATO. The main obstacle turned out to be the German government, headed by Chancellor Helmut Kohl. The German magazine Der Spiegel studied previously confidential documents from the publications of the Institute of Modern History, as well as from the personal archive of one of the participants in the events, and tells us what considerations guided and how Clinton, Kohl, Russian President Boris Yeltsin and their subordinates acted.

Back in 1991, before the official collapse of the USSR, Yeltsin proclaimed joining NATO as Russia's "long-term political goal." The former member countries of the Warsaw Pact Organization (the "Eastern Bloc" led by the USSR) stated the same thing, and Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev asked the American administration to treat Russia is treated the same way as other "new democracies".

Moscow believed that since the negotiations on the unification of Germany in 1990, there had been a "basic understanding": Russia (then still the USSR) was abandoning hegemony over Eastern Europe, and in return the West recognized it as an equal political and military partner.

The Russian side believed that it had fulfilled its part of this informal agreement. Countries that were formerly Soviet satellites or Soviet republics sought to join NATO mainly in order to obtain security guarantees in case Russia wanted to dominate them again. Yeltsin and his associates considered these fears unfounded, and in January 1994, during Clinton's visit to Moscow, they offered him an unexpected decision: to accept Russia into NATO first, and then other Eastern European countries. Clinton did not agree to this arrangement.

At the NATO summit in In Brussels in January 1994, the alliance approved in principle the Partnership for Peace program, which involves military cooperation with the former Warsaw Pact countries. Strobe Talbott, the American special envoy for the former USSR and a personal friend of Clinton, flew straight from Moscow to Brussels and informed the allies: the United States considers the expansion of NATO to the east a done deal, and in ten years Russia should also be accepted into the alliance.

Already in August 1994, when the Partnership for Peace was launched, and Russia has become an important participant in the program, — German diplomats reported from Washington's response to Berlin is that the position of Clinton and Talbott is not supported by either The State Department, nor in Neither the Pentagon, nor the CIA, nor even the White House itself (obviously, the US National Security Council).

The prospect of Russia joining NATO raised many objections from European allies, especially Germany: Chancellor Kohl, Vice Chancellor, Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel, and Defense Minister Volker Ruhe were against it. They believed that Russia's entry would mean a sharp increase in internal contradictions in the alliance, so that it would become incapacitated. German politicians were not sure that Russia would remain on the path of market and democratic reforms, and feared that it could once again become a threat to Europe, as during the Cold War., — and then it will be much more difficult to resist it if it is a member of NATO, which was created just to contain it.

The main objection was that if Russia had a conflict with, say, China, European soldiers would have to go to war on the other side of the continent.As Der Spiegel notes, a decade later, German Chancellor Angela Merkel raised a similar objection to Ukraine's admission to NATO — only Russia was already in China's place. And since decisions on the admission of new members to NATO are made only unanimously, neither Russia nor Ukraine were eventually accepted into the alliance.                                                               

At the same time, in 1994, the German government carefully avoided objecting to Russia's admission in public, so as not to spoil bilateral relations with Moscow. When Kozyrev, an ardent supporter of Russia's integration into Western structures, directly asked his German counterpart Klaus Kinkel what the problem was, he replied that the alliance was "not ready for Russia's entry" at the moment, but did not raise any fundamental objections.

Chancellor Kohl avoided this topic altogether when communicating with Yeltsin. But Yeltsin did not raise this issue, because he believed that the support of the United States was enough for him. At the same time, Kohl diligently established friendly relations between Russia and Germany, primarily business ties, and considered it necessary to support Yeltsin in the presidential elections scheduled for 1996.

Considering Clinton's ideas about Russia's admission to NATO incomplete, Kohl was at the same time unhappy with Polish President Lech Walesa.: he compared Russia to a bear that should be put in a cage, and insisted that his country join NATO as soon as possible, regardless of the interests of the alliance's members, in particular, with the bilateral relations of Germany and Russia.

Kohl proposed first to admit Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary to the European Union, and to postpone the expansion of NATO until 2000. But Clinton decided that it would take too long. As a result, official negotiations on the accession of these three countries to NATO began in 1997, and they became members of the alliance in 1999. 

They joined the EU only in 2004.Andrei Kozyrev writes in his memoirs of 2019 that the issue of Russia's membership in NATO was a "litmus test" for him: if they take it, it is an alliance in defense of the free world, if not, it is an anti—Russian bloc. The way NATO expansion was organized convinced him that the second option was correct.