2008, the relations deteriorated further and became almost openly hostile, following the 2008 Kosovo declaration of independence from Russia′s ally Serbia and its partial recognition by the West, to which Russia responded in August 2008 with launching the Russo-Georgian War. On 20 August 2009, Russia officially informed the depository of the Energy Charter Treaty (the Government of Portugal) that it did not intend to become a contracting party to the treaty. On 1 April 2014, NATO unanimously decided to suspend all practical co-operation with the Russian Federation in response to the annexation of Crimea, but the NATO-Russia Council (NRC) was not suspended. In 2015, Russia entirely terminated its participation in the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. On 18 February 2017, Russia's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov, said he supported the resumption of military cooperation with the NATO alliance. In late March 2017, the Council met in advance of a NATO Foreign Ministers conference in Brussels, Belgium. After the subsequent 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Founding Act has been considered by the NATO member states as definitively abrogated in its entirety by Russia, while the latter has been declared at the 2022 NATO Madrid summit "a direct threat" to Euro-Atlantic security. In the same year, Russia withdrew from the European Convention on Human Rights and was expelled from the Council of Europe. Russian claims of unwritten assurances The treaty does not mention NATO membership prospects of any other countries, as none of them has been a party to the treaty, while only 4 out of the 15 NATO member states at the time have been parties to it. Some commentators, such as Stephen F. Cohen, as well as Mikhail Gorbachev in 2008, have advanced in later years the interpretation of a comment allegedly made by US Secretary of State, James Baker, to the effect that NATO would expand "not one inch eastward" in a unified Germany, as applying instead to Eastern Europe; neither has such a provision been included in the treaty, nor any of the parties has proposed or demanded its inclusion, and neither a recording nor written minutes of the Baker's comment exist. In 2014, Gorbachev said that the assurance only pertained to East Germany, and that the resulting agreement was upheld by NATO. His main aide in these negotiations, Eduard Shevardnadze, likewise agreed that NATO never made any such commitment regarding other countries in