I see the Budapest memo referenced a lot but, obviously, it's a memo ... about ways to get rid of nukes. It's not a treaty that obligates anything at all from the United States or anyone else in terms of security support or guaranteeing Ukrainian sovereignty. I will grant, however, that the Ukrainians (and the Russians, we made promises to them in it too) probably feel pretty slighted with how history turned out in the ensuing decades.

From your link:

>>Another key point was that U.S. State Department lawyers made a distinction between "guarantee" and "assurance", referring to the security guarantees that were desired by Ukraine in exchange for non-proliferation. In the end a statement was read into the negotiation record that the (according to the U.S. lawyers) lesser sense of the English word "assurance" would be the sole implied translation for all appearances of both terms in all three language versions of the statement.

>Which other conflict is waged with the goal of eliminating the country completely and destroy its culture?

There's a lot going on in Africa and the Horn. More or less all feature some degree of genocide or mass killings, objectives of replacing the current government, or redrawing the lines on the map.

>There were no major conflicts of this kind since WW2.

This is absolutely not true. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan (the first one), Myanmar and a couple others I'm forgetting all were an order of magnitude larger than this one in terms of casualties. Maybe you mean this is the first major conflict of this kind in Europe since WWII, in which case... maybe, because you'd have to omit Yugoslavia. There's room to argue about that one. Not sure why that's relevant, unless we're going back to the insistence about the United States' role in security on the European continent.

Problem for US and rest of NATO is that Baltic countries ARE in NATO. Once Ukraine goes Vilnus is next. Is USA ready to fight a conventional war in the Baltics? With what manpower? Germany is utterly useless right now and will be for the foreseeable future, French army is way too small same with UK. Very soon you might have to go to the Nukes..

It is much cheaper and safer to fight this war in Ukraine rather then trying to liberate Lithuania

I think what you mean to say is that "NATO is the United States, the rest of the countries are just members". That's not to knock, necessarily, the rest of the members - they've all made choices and assumptions about their own security. I agree, this is a problem, for many more reasons than the fact that only a small percentage of Americans know which country Vilnius is in, let alone where it is on a map.

>It is much cheaper and safer to fight this war in Ukraine rather then trying to liberate Lithuania

This is what I do not understand, the "safer" part. How exactly is it "safer" to intentionally antagonize the old Cold War adversary over a country that even President Obama admitted is not a strategic interest to the United States? To attempt to steelman this, we should support/arm/fund the Ukrainians as a means to degrade and destroy (by proxy) Russian combat power just in case they invade Lithuania next - or maybe to try and prevent them from being of use to the Chinese in a new Pacific War - knowing full well that they know invading a NATO country means WWIII in Europe (and probably the Pacific, who knows). This sounds awfully similar to the "we have to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" refrain that I heard all the time in the lead up to GWII and thereafter as we extended our stays in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it's the most compelling argument in favor of support I can come up with. I still think it's wrong, though.

Do they know that? Will Germany magically stop using Russian gas, reinstitute draft and manage to produce more than a dozen tanks a year? All the signals pre-invasion of Ukraine pointed to no. Unlike Ukraine right now Baltics CAN be taken by a surprise air mobile assault, some of those countries have 20%+ of population who subsist on healthy dose of RT and worship Putin the Tsar, they will serve as pawns we see now in Donbass.

Practically how does NATO actually liberate them. Does it have the stomach for the full scale high intensity war as we see in now in the East Ukraine? Not just Putin, I am also not sure of that. Who is going to lead the American armoured division drive to capture Kaliningrad..

Yes detoothing Russia in Ukraine is MUCH safer.

Yeah, it’s fair to question the real commitment to Article 5 that some NATO members have given their entanglement in a number of other economic engagements. I tend to think that there’s kind of a priority list of NATO members in reality that differs from what’s on paper. Germany? Absolutely. France and the UK? Of course. But Lithuania and Turkey? Poland I still think is a red line since, well, it’s been a red line since 1945 I suppose.

I don’t know that I’m as confident as you are in the Russian VDV’s ability to competently conduct an airborne invasion given their, shall we say, clumsy implementation of combined arms war in Ukraine thus war. I’d also love to see a citation that 20% (really?) of the population in the Baltics wouldn’t freakout and instead either actively support or be indifferent to a Russian invasion.

I am not certain they could, but it is not me who makes decisions, and those guys thought they could take Kyiv in 36 hours. It seems doable as paras could be reinforced much faster. The big problem is the none of those countries have depth to absorb initial attack, Ukraine's terrain is not great for the defender but at least it is a large country.

I was incorrect about the 5th column number. Lithuania is actually the best in this category with very few non-citizens. Seems like many left and some naturalized, current total is more like 8% not 33% like it was in the 90s. Latvia has the most but it is still much less than 20%.

The thing to realize is that for Latvia it is very much like Ukraine in terms of geographic distribution of ethnic Russians vs ethnic Latvians.