Biden played a key role in NATO's eastward expansion in the 90s, for which Putin is now threatening to invade Ukraine.

“This, in fact, is the beginning of another 50 years of peace,” declared Democratic Senator Joe Biden of Delaware in 1998 as the Senate voted in favor of expanding NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.

Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in those days, said that adding former Cold War enemies to the Western military alliance constituted “righting a historical injustice forced upon the Poles, Czechs and Hungarians by Joseph Stalin.”

The Washington Post, in its report on the Senate vote, described Biden as a “key player in the ratification effort.” Indeed, then-Senator Biden was among the loudest voices in support of NATO expansion into Eastern Europe in the late 1990s. He would continue to support NATO expansion in the 2000s as one of the most influential senators in Washington and later as vice president.

Now in 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin is threatening to embroil Europe in a new war over the very issue that Biden once claimed would foster decades of peace. When the Soviet Union collapsed, some Warsaw Pact countries that had dominated it threw their lot in NATO — moves that Russian leaders saw as weakening their influence and ability to defend themselves against European invasions like those mounted by Napoleon and Hitler.

With some 100,000 troops on Ukraine's border, Putin is seeking to block the former Soviet republic from joining NATO. Although the Kremlin claims it has no plans to invade Ukraine, the Biden administration has warned that a Russian military incursion into the former Soviet republic could be imminent.

A crisis 30 years in the making

Putin has a history of aggression against Ukraine. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 — annexing Crimea and its Black Sea port in the process — and has since backed rebels in a war against Ukrainian forces in the eastern Donbas region.

The Russian leader's decision to attack Ukraine that year followed mass protests that led to the ouster of the country's pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, who now lives in exile in Russia.

The Russian president has said that Ukraine “isn’t even a state,” and has called Ukrainians and Russians “one people.” He has made his ambitions in the region quite clear: he wants the US out of Europe and Ukraine under Russian control.

Putin is very serious about taking action on Ukraine, Fiona Hill, who served as a senior adviser on Russia on the National Security Council under the Trump administration, told Insider in November. “One way or another, he wants Ukraine neutralized,” Hill added, underscoring that Putin sees Russia’s immediate neighbor as unfinished business.

Meanwhile, Putin has blamed NATO's eastward expansion for the contentious dynamic between Moscow and the West.

It's a geopolitical hostage crisis – and neither side is backing down. The US and its allies have made it clear that NATO's open-door policy is non-negotiable, while Russia rejects calls to withdraw troops from the Ukrainian border.

Putin, a former KGB operative, has ruled Russia for 20 years. During that time, he has modernized the Russian military and fought to reestablish Moscow’s authority in countries that were once part of the Soviet Union. The Russian leader’s belligerent stance on Ukraine — and his anger at NATO — is intrinsically linked to those ambitions.

“The current crisis between Russia and Ukraine is a reckoning that has been in the making for 30 years. It is about much more than Ukraine and its potential NATO membership. It is about the future of the European order created after the collapse of the Soviet Union,” Angela Stent, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former U.S. National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia, wrote recently in Foreign Affairs.

Putin rewrote history

Putin on Tuesday said NATO was “deceiving” Russia, claiming that Moscow “was given promises not to move NATO infrastructure in the East, not even a single centimeter.” The Russian president has repeatedly accused NATO of breaking such a promise, but experts say Putin is distorting history to justify aggression against Ukraine.

“[Putin] claims that NATO has taken advantage of Russian weakness after the collapse of the Soviet Union to expand eastward, contrary to promises supposedly made to Moscow by Western leaders. But no such promises were made,” Steven Pifer, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000, wrote in 2014 for the Brookings Institution.

Although it is true that the US in 1990 floated the idea of ​​stopping NATO's expansion to the East during discussions with the Soviet Union on the reunification of Germany, there has never been a formal agreement in this regard.

“I don’t think Putin is that concerned about historical accuracy,” Mary Sarotte, a historian who wrote a book on NATO expansion, “Not an Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Stalemate,” recently told the New Yorker.

“At one extreme, there is a position that you sometimes hear from the American side, that none of this ever happened, it’s a total myth, the Russians are psychotic,” Sarotte said. “On the other hand, you have the very blunt Russian position: ‘We were totally betrayed, there’s no doubt about it.’ Not surprisingly, when you get into the evidence, the truth seems to be somewhere in between.”

In the wake of World War II, NATO was founded by the United States and its allies to defend Western Europe from the Soviet Union. Since the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War, many former Soviet republics have joined NATO, including Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Romania. Biden, as a senator and vice president, consistently supported this process.

As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in March 2008, for example, Biden expressed pride “that here in the Senate, I helped lead the effort to expand NATO,” adding that it remained “his conviction that we should extend an offer of NATO membership to any country that applies and meets the criteria.”

At the time, Biden was expressing support for expanding NATO's presence in the Balkans by adding Albania, Croatia, and Macedonia as members. He also advocated putting Ukraine and Georgia on a path to NATO membership. Russian troops, under Putin's orders, would go on to invade Georgia just a few months later, in August 2008.

As vice president in 2009, Biden said the US supported Ukraine's move to join NATO — despite objections from Russia.

With Putin resentful of NATO expansion and the U.S. eager to prevent a new conflict in Europe, Biden as president has taken a more cautious tone on the subject than he did as a senator or vice president. Although Biden has stressed that the U.S. firmly supports NATO’s open-door policy, he is on his toes on the issue of Ukraine’s admission to the alliance.

Given that Ukraine is not a NATO member, Biden has ruled out sending troops if Russia invades. But Biden is planning to send thousands of troops to Poland and Romania, both NATO allies, in the coming days. Tensions between Moscow and the West have not been this high since the Cold War, and it is an open question what will happen next.