Can the West ever trust Putin?

The two most interesting statements made by Vladimir Putin in his more than four-hour press conference on Friday were: there will be no more wars provided the West respects Russia; and the West deceived Moscow by trying to expand Nato's membership to include Ukraine. So, all the talk about Europe having to go on a war footing to fight Russia in the next few years is all blarney, provided Europe is nice to Putin, takes him back into the international community and lifts all sanctions etc etc. I assume that's what Putin means by "respect". And then his constant mantra that there would never have been a war in Ukraine if Nato hadn't put Ukraine on the potential list of applicants for joining the alliance. I was at the Bucharest Nato summit in 2008 when President George W Bush pushed hard for the alliance to present Ukraine with a Membership Action Plan which would have been the first step in bringing Kyiv into the alliance. France, Italy and the UK argued against it and in the end all the summit promised was that some day Ukraine would be part of the alliance. But Moscow had been given a verbal pledge in 1990 by James Baker, then US secretary of state, that Nato would not expand eastwards. Gorbachov was the Russian leader then. But Putin never forgot the Baker verbal, even though it never became a written pledge by the alliance, because not much later East Germany reunified with West Germany and as a result, East Germany was absorbed into Nato. Ergo, the Baker pledge vanished. But Putin's answer to a question by the BBC's inestimable Moscow Editor, Steve Rosenberg, made it clear that he justified the invasion of Ukraine because of that breach of trust by the Americans. Whether that justifies what Putin did by invading Ukraine is a matter for debate. But the fact is, the 1990 promise that Nato would not expand eastwards still makes Putin angry and distrustful of the West. For what it's worth, I always thought and wrote and spoke out about that Nato expanding or promising to expand to absorb Ukraine and Georgia was a mistake and was likely to raise paranoia in Moscow. Et voila!