Andrey Kozyrev, who rose through the diplomatic ranks in the Soviet Union and then Russia to become appointed as Russian Foreign Minister, served as President Boris Yeltsin’s Foreign Minister between 1992 and 1996.
Today, living outside Russia, he publicly gives the lie to Kremlin propaganda that says there was a promise made to Moscow that NATO would not expand East to former Warsaw pact countries or the former Soviet Republish. Kozyrev knows of no such agreement.
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“It’s not true [that there were assurances],” he told Kyiv Post.
He then adds: “When I was foreign minister, we tried to find a trace of that in [the] archives and we failed. And Gorbachev… later denied receiving any kind of assurance. To my knowledge it’s total nonsense.”
Moreover, despite extensive research by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs during his tenure as minister, Kozyrev said his team was unable to locate any evidence that Washington had ever made such a promise to Mikhail Gorbachev – in total contradiction to what President Vladimir Putin has repeated for years.
As an earlier supporter of liberalization and democracy in the USSR, Kozyrev made waves by publishing an essay, during Glasnost, arguing that the enshrined communist belief in “international class struggle,” was nonsense. Despite the optimism of post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s, things have not turned out as Kozyrev had hoped. Looking back, Kozyrev says that things could have all been different had Russia taken a different path – something which Kozyrev tried to push, but failed.
Kozyrev served in the Russian Duma (parliament) twice and was active in Democratic Choice of Russia, a political party headed by famed Russian reformer Yegor Gaidar. Democratic Choice of Russia, later in 2001, rolled into the Union of Right Forces, the party that was the political home to many pro-democratic and anti-Putin leaders, including Boris Nemtsov.
Today, Kozyrev describes what modern Russia has become as a horrifying disappointment. Illustrating this sentiment, Kozyrev refers to his one-time deputy, Sergey Lavrov, whom he had helped promote through the ranks, as “a disgrace.”
While reflecting on what is transpiring in Ukraine, Kozyrev says that the Ukrainian people have his total “admiration” and support, as he hopes for their victory against tyranny.
Andrey Kozyrev’s riveting book, Firebird: The Elusive Fate of Russian Democracy, is a must read for anyone who wishes to know how Russia became the nation that it is today.
