Christopher Clark and Kristina Spohr, The Guardian (United Kingdom)
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.