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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />#putin #nato #apt
