And what do you suppose this "spirit" to be? And what do you base it on? What should the U..S./Europe have done differently?

Meanwhile, I'll just note that it seems perverse, to say the least, to focus on hand wavy, alleged U.S./European violations of the "spirit" of the memorandum while Russia is literally dropping bombs on Kiev.

> And what do you suppose this "spirit" to be?

You give away your nukes, and we’ll protect you.

I don’t think Russia needs any extra condemnation, do you? But that was always kind of in the cards. I hold my own country (and the rest of the western world) to a higher standard.

That clearly was not either the letter of spirit of the Budapest Memorandum. An affirmative obligation to defend Ukraine from aggression is not the kind of obligation that the drafters of the agreement would have just left to the imagination. And you can tell that nobody seriously thinks that the memorandum created such an obligation because, if it did, Ukraine's possible accession to NATO would not have been such a big deal. It would already have had protections functionally equivalent to NATO Art. V (i.e., the mutual defense provisions).

If you have specific things that you think the west should be doing, like kicking Russia out of Swift, barring energy imports from Russia, etc. I'd be interested to hear it. I might even agree with you! But this talk about the US/Europe somehow violating the Budapest Memorandum just strikes me as misinformation that plays into the Russian narrative.