NATO embarked on an ambitious enlargement agenda to Eastern Europe that saw the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland enter the alliance in 1999. Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia and the three Baltic states followed in 2004 as well as Croatia and Albania in 2009. NATO has furthermore developed close ties with a number of post-Soviet republics, particularly with Georgia and Ukraine, both of which have in the past declared an interest in joining the alliance.
NATO has held military exercises with these states and recently reiterated its continued support for Georgia's plans to gain NATO membership. Tbilisi now builds units according to NATO standards so as to ensure interoperability in the future. It is this policy of regional involvement that is directly at odds with the alliance's global mission. Indeed, it has helped to re-create the very linear defence line it claims to have abandoned in the early 1990s, but now further to the East.
NATO has held that its expansion to the former Warsaw Pact and its flirtation with the post-Soviet republics was never directed against Moscow, but merely an attempt to stabilise democratic transitions in these states. Russia has never quite believed that version of events, reminding the alliance that its most powerful member state, the U.S., once gave Russia an informal promise that NATO would not expand eastwards.
NEWPORT Russia (Reuters) - NATO, responding to Russian warnings against Ukraine's bid to join the western alliance, said on Friday that no third country could veto its enlargement policy and approved new steps to advance Georgia towards membership.
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