No I am challenging your basic premise. If you want to get some epically huge guarantees that all former Warsaw Pact countries will be denied the sovereign decision to join NATO for eternity. You’d demand at the very least to have that recorded in summit press notes but rather in some treaty, the way you made it look like innitially, it was done but it wasn’t - not at all.

The assurances further never were guarantees for the distant future. They were assurances during negotiations for and in the context of sudden German unification. Context matters and wording does too. Unless you are of course claiming that Russian leaders and diplomats are stupid and clueless.

If Russia considered those odd verbal assurances made in completely different circumstances that was missing from each and every agreement Russia has made with anyone, one would have expected that they had made some major fuss about the NATO expansion when it actually happened. They didn’t.

It just feels very forced of an argument something that was not only never repeated, also not in treaties after 1990, where that could have been done. But the second the Russian regime loses control over Ukraine, not because of what NATO has done but because it lost power in Ukraine to the people of Ukraine.

The simple question if those mentioned verbal assurances during a few negotiations in 1990, were of any significance in 2014 when Russia decided to break a number of binding treaties and invade a neighbour country it was contractually obliged to protect, is the following. Would Russia have acted in any way differently in 2014 if those verbal assurances in 1990 had never occured? I dare to say no, not at all. Russia would have done the very same thing under Putin because it was never about NATO or assurances, it was about losing control of Ukraine to the Ukrainian people and Putin could not accept that. If it makes no difference it is also of no significance.