25th anniversary of the NATO-Russia Founding Act

Italian Admiral Giampaolo Di Paola and Russian General Nikolay Makarov are satisfied. In May 2011, at NATO headquarters in Brussels, the chairman of the alliance's Military Committee and the chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces signed a document on closer cooperation. The agreement was based on the NATO-Russia Founding Act of May 27, 1997.

The rapprochement began before the collapse of the Soviet Union. At a summit in London in July 1990, NATO announced that it no longer regarded the Warsaw Pact countries as adversaries. A few days later, the secretary general of the alliance, former German defense minister Manfred Wörner, went to Moscow for talks with the president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Paris, May 27, 1997: Here, the NATO-Russia Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security has just been signed. The presidents of the United States, Russia, and France — Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin, and Jacques Chirac — celebrate with NATO Secretary General Javier Solana and the leaders of other NATO countries on what is heralded as the start of a new era.

The NATO-Russia Council, established in 2002, became the main platform for discussing military policy issues and coordinating cooperation. NATO suspended its work in August 2008 on account of the Russian invasion of Georgia but resumed it less than a year later. At this meeting of the Council in Berlin in April 2011, the foreign ministers focused on the situation in Libya and Afghanistan.

The NATO-Russia Council met in April 2008 at a NATO summit in Bucharest, Afterwards, Vladimir Putin looked very satisfied. There were objections at the summit, from Germany and France in particular, to Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO, and the accession of both countries was indefinitely postponed. This was precisely what the Russian president had set as his goal.

July 2011: NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen is seen jogging in St. Petersburg. Talks at the NATO-Russia Council in Sochi the previous evening on missile defense and nuclear weapons had proved difficult. However, the two sides continued to look for mutually agreeable solutions. Rasmussen was in St. Petersburg to give a speech to cadets at the Russian Naval Academy.

An example of just how much trust there was on NATO's side is the deal France struck with Moscow to deliver two Mistral-class amphibious assault ships. It was only when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 that Paris canceled the deal, and sold the two vessels to Egypt instead.

One form of cooperation between the two sides was a joint effort to improve the safety of international commercial shipping routes. In February 2013, the crew of the Russian ship Severomorsk participated in an exercise alongside the Italian ship San Marco in the Gulf of Aden, between Yemen and Somalia, to hone their tactics in dealing with pirates.

A major commercial cooperation project was to be the use of the airport Vostochny in Ulyanovsk, which has particularly long runways. NATO was to be allowed to use the airfield as part of its supply line from western Europe to Afghanistan. However, the plan was greeted with widespread public protest in Russia and abandoned in 2012.

In October 2013, a regular meeting of the defense ministers of the NATO-Russia Council took place in Brussels. By then, the relationship between Moscow and the West was already strained, but Russia's Sergei Shoigu and his US counterpart, Chuck Hagel, were both still sporting a smile. Four months later, Russia launched its military operation to annex Crimea.

After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and instigated the war in eastern Ukraine, NATO froze cooperation with Moscow and invited the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, to the 2014 NATO summit in the UK. Both sides condemned Russia's actions and stated their firm commitment to developing a special partnership between the alliance and Ukraine.

At the end of 2021, in view of the buildup of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border and Moscow's demand that NATO withdraw behind its 1997 line, alliance Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg proposed that the two sides meet for talks. A Russian delegation arrived in Brussels on January 12, 2022. On February 24, Russia attacked Ukraine, putting an end to 25 years of cooperation with NATO.