As APT History revisits one of the most extraordinary and least-remembered moments in NATO–Russia relations, we uncover the day Vladimir Putin stunned the Western press by pulling out a declassified Soviet document from 1954 — a formal request for the USSR to join NATO.
On June 16, 2001, at Brdo Castle in Slovenia, during George W. Bush’s first face-to-face summit with Putin, the Russian president read aloud a Cold War-era proposal the West had dismissed as “completely unrealistic.” In a single gesture, Putin flipped the entire NATO-expansion narrative on its head, arguing that it was the West — not Moscow — that had rejected a shared security system and chosen confrontation.
This episode, overshadowed by the events of 9/11 and later geopolitical clashes, reveals how Putin weaponized forgotten history to reshape global perception and how the seeds of today’s tensions were planted long before Russia’s more confrontational era began.
Join us as APT History reconstructs the moment when a single sheet of paper from 1954 became one of Putin’s most strategic narrative ambushes — and a warning about how powerful forgotten history can be.
#putin #nato #apt
