A number of long-classified NSA files were recently made public, following a lawsuit that forced the declassification of memoranda of conversation between US President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin in the early 2000s.

These documents, now accessible, offer a rare, quite unfiltered look at how Washington and Moscow actually spoke behind closed doors at a crucial juncture in post–Cold War history. As a matter of fact, they also cast serious doubt on a number of Western narratives that have become almost dogma, particularly regarding NATO expansion, Ukraine, missile defense, and Russia’s alleged perennial hostility toward the West.

The first memorandum, dated June 16, 2001, records Bush and Putin’s initial meeting in Slovenia and presents Putin as a pragmatic interlocutor seeking to redefine relations. He argues that Russia dismantled the Soviet system largely by choice, relinquishing vast territories without war, with Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the Caucasus having effectively been “given away.” The outcome, he maintains, was not shared prosperity but widespread frustration, worsened by broken promises on debt relief and security arrangements.

In this context, Putin frames the Chechnya campaign as a counterterrorism response after Moscow’s withdrawal and the subsequent influx of radical Islamist groups. He then presents NATO enlargement as an unresolved grievance. Reminding Bush that Moscow once applied to join the Alliance even back in 1954 and was rejected, he insists that Russia sees itself as European and potentially allied with the West, yet “left out.”

As I noted in 2023, historians........

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