[dragonwriter]

> The promise was made

Not in the form in which binding, durable, heritable international commitments are made it was not.

Not even the people most committed to spinning the evidence in favor of Russia bother to claim that (which is good, because it would be obviously false), they just try to get people to ignore that,and pretend what would even by the most favorable interpretation of the evidence be private assurances were binding commitments in future governments of the state whose representatives made them, in radically changed circumstances, inheritable by a state that didn't exist as an independent subject of international law at the time they were given, applicable after the state they were given to ceased to exist by, primarily, the action of the entity claiming to exercise them.

And they go further, and make arguments that rely not only on them being still binding, but on violation of them being an act equivalent in international law to an actual or imminent attack justifying war against third parties who aren't even under any theory involved in the supposed agreement except possibly as a co-inheritor with Russia of the interests of the USSR.