Eastern Europe, and that "the question never came up" in the talks on German reunification. That is presumably because all of the countries in question were still in the Warsaw Pact at the time and hosted large Soviet garrisons. Gorbachev and his successor, Boris Yeltsin, felt that NATO's later acceptance of countries like Poland violated the spirit of the earlier agreements. In December 2017, researchers Tom Blanton and Svetlana Savranskaya argued that declassified documents challenged this narrative. They commented: "The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels." They further said that "the view of the State Department was that NATO expansion was not on the agenda, because it was not in the interest of the U.S. to organize 'an anti-Soviet coalition' that extended to the Soviet borders, not least because it might reverse the positive trends in the Soviet Union. (See Document 26) The Bush administration took the latter view. And that's what the Soviets heard." In 2018, Hannes Adomeit disputed the conclusions by Blanton and Savranskaya, saying that those documents were already known, and that "it is inadmissible to conclude that assurances concerning the expansion of NATO command structures and the stationing of NATO forces on the territory of the former GDR had anything to do with promises concerning the enlargement of the Alliance east of a unified Germany." Additionally, he stated that "a distinction must be drawn between informal or exploratory talks of this nature on the one hand and negotiations, promises, commitments or indeed guarantees on the other." An analysis by Marc Trachtenberg in 2021 concluded that "the Russian allegations are by no means baseless ... But the Soviets were not deliberately misled." In her 2021 book Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of the Cold War Stalemate, Mary Elise Sarotte balanced out these different interpretations, concluding that Russian claims of betrayal are in fact untrue in law but have psychological truth. On 18 February 2022, German magazine Der Spiegel published an investigation of the British National