Washington, D.C., April 4, 2024 - Top NATO and U.S. officials worked out cooperative agreements with senior Russian leaders including the defense minister of the newly independent Russian Federation during three years of high-level dialogue and hands-on engagement from 1992 to 1995, according to previously secret Russian and American documents published today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. Marking the 75th anniversary of the signing of the NATO Treaty in April 1949, the new publication illuminates the all-too-brief period of close U.S., NATO, and Russian security cooperation in the 1990s, which dramatically reduced nuclear arms and risks, addressed peacekeeping challenges in the Balkans, and held out hope of Russia’s eventual integration into Europe and partnership with NATO. The documents describe joint U.S.-Russian peacekeeping exercises at Fort Riley, Kansas, breakthrough understandings on treaty negotiations, and meetings of the minds on the future security of Europe with leaders of the Russian Supreme Soviet and its successor, the Duma. In the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine, the new evidence highlights the tragedy of roads not taken and hopes unfulfilled. The documents include the Russian transcript, published for the first time, of NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner’s lengthy conversation in Moscow with Supreme Soviet Chairman Ruslan Khasbulatov in February 1992, where Woerner outlines the NATO vision of Europe as “a new security environment from [the Urals] to the Atlantic … built on three pillars”: the Helsinki process, the European economic community, and NATO – a view very close to Russia’s own. The documents also include U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry’s dramatic SECRET/EYES ONLY memo to President Clinton recounting his three-day visit with Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev in October 1995 – a meeting that was “quite tense” at first but that was ultimately a “smashing success,” as the two defense chiefs together pressed the “dual key!” that blew up a U.S. Minuteman missile silo at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. |