It is certainly true that, as American critics assert, Russian President Vladimir Putin's attitude towards civil liberties and political opponents is exactly what you'd expect of a former KGB agent. Yet it is also true that his current demands are not unreasonable. In fact, much of what Putin wants, the United States originally promised and then went back on.
Putin's central demand is that NATO remove troops from countries that joined the group of U.S.-allied nations after 1997. In 1990, under George H.W. Bush, Secretary of State James Baker repeatedly promised Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders that if the USSR let the Warsaw Pact nations leave, NATO would not "move one inch eastward." As is detailed in declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents released in 2017, Bush and the leaders of West Germany, the U.K. and France gave similar assurances.
