Russian invasion of Ukraine

A load of former classified files from 1991 are about to be released in Germany and it's going to be interesting. I ran some parts of an article about it through a translator:

Gorbachev's long-time former foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze warned the Germans. Should the Soviet Union disintegrate, a "fascist leader" could one day appear in Russia demanding the return of Crimea from Ukraine, he predicted in October 1991 during a visit by Genscher.

Putin then annexed Crimea a good two decades later.

Even a resurgence of toxic nationalism in Eastern Europe as once happened after the First World War seemed conceivable to Chancellor Kohl in 1991. He said that if the Baltic states became independent, "the row with Poland would start (again)". Poland and Lithuania had fought each other in 1920.

And so the Palatine decided: "A break-up of the Soviet Union cannot be in our interest..."
In the end, the Balts and Ukrainians won their independence anyway. And it will probably not be possible to conclusively clarify whether Kohl made a mistake in judgement or whether Latvians and Lithuanians were simply lucky that their path was halfway peaceful.

In any case, many allies in the West obviously tended in the same direction as the Germans. France's power-conscious President Mitterrand, for example, scolded the Balts, "you can't jeopardise everything you've achieved (with Moscow - the ed.) just to help countries that haven't had their own existence for 400 years." Even US President George Bush, former CIA chief and cold realist, complained about the insistence of the Baltic politicians striving for independence