In the same memorandum Russia promised the same thing. They broke the promise. Repeatedly.
Nonetheless, I agree that more countries should develop their own nukes. Especially the ones like Poland, Baltics and Nordics. Not because it's a good thing to do, but because the world is what it is.
It's really disappointing how much misinformation gets reiterated on the Internet with regards to this memorandum, given how short the document is and how easy it is to verify its contents oneself.
PS. NATO's Article 5 is also worth a read. It does not guarantee what is commonly claimed.
In the history of the Alliance there is only a single country that invoked article 5, and it was the US with 9/11 that lead to the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia, Italy, New Zealand to send resources and troops to help with Afghanistan.
And managed to get people involved in Iraq namely United Kingdom, Australia, Poland.
And this situation was way worse and way less called for than the Ukrainians defending themselves...
EDIT/NB: I listed just the major contributors, some other countries participated in different ways and at different levels, but still this is important to mention here...
When the US requested assistance, Europe provided.
I genuinely don't know where's "there".
It is a fact, that NATO Article 5 doesn't guarantee anything regardless of other countries' response to USA triggering it, just as it is a fact, that the Budapest Memorandum was mischaracterized in this thread and that both the Europe and USA did help Ukraine. Should we not go where the facts are?
If you're about that the USA should continue helping Ukraine, then I did not question this point of view at all. Pointing out factual errors is not equal to taking a stance.
Friendship among nations sometimes involves transactions that transcend the pure material considerations, and this shift in alignment is not desirable by anyone.
That's what I meant by "let's not go there".
But I see that basically we are in agreement and I also agree that article 5 interpretation could be dicey.
[0] https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%203007/P...
> ... seek immediate UN Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine ... if they should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used
This seems like the passage which would cover it. The UN is able to authorize use of force by member states against the aggressor. Though it looks like it hasn't done that - probably because of Russia's permanent position on the UN Security Council which would veto any such measures.
Russia vetoed it, as expectged.
The GP said:
>> The memorandum also said they would provide assistance
The memorandum does not contain an obligation to "provide assistance". "Providing assistance" and "seeking UNSC action" are very different things.
>> they are not keeping that promise.
They are not keeping promise to "provide assistance" because they have never made that promise.
This is how it was presented: Ukraine, politically and economically unstable since it became an independent state after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, has 176 intercontinental missiles armed with some 1,240 nuclear warheads--all aimed at the United States.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-01-11-mn-10675-...
"All aimed at the United States". None at Russia. It was USA that pushed for Ukraine's disarmament. And in 2011, NATO undertook "the largest disarmament project in the world" (their own words) to disarm Ukraine, after they were told by the new Ukrainian administration to stop integrating with Ukraine!
That Budapest memorandum was never turned into a treaty but kept as a memorandum. It was just about as binding as the promise "not to expand NATO eastward". Not the Baker promise, the one from Clinton to Yeltsin:
https://www.intellinews.com/clinton-promised-yeltsin-nato-ex...
https://peoplesworld.org/article/documents-reveal-clinton-fo...
USA pushed Russia into accepting the NATO expansion while promising it won't be a threat. And it pushed Ukraine into disarming.
Then after USA invaded Iraq (and Russia tried their best to stop it but were told to step aside), unilaterally pulled out of the anti-ballistic nuclear treaty, and inducted even more countries into NATO, Putin came to NATO and delivered that Munich speech in 2007, about a "multipolar world": https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unilateral-withdrawal-fro...
In response, Bush started pushing Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. The actual people of Ukraine didn't want to be in NATO:
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2010/03/29/ukraine-says-n...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/127094/ukrainians-likely-suppor...
and that was still the case until 2013 even:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/167927/crisis-ukrainians-likely...
but that didn't matter to Bush, who found that Yuschenko, the president of Ukraine, was willing to work with him to push through this unpopular thing: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nato-ukraine-bush/bush-vo...
Not even other NATO countries wanted it, France and Germany pushed back but Bush was undeterred. It sparked a brief war between Georgia and Russia in 2008, (during which Medvedev, not Putin, was president). Same exact dynamics, two breakaway republics, but they were called Abhazia and South Ossetia. Russia's invasion ended as quickly as it began because French president Nicolas Sarkozy negotiated a peace agreement in a few days. This time around, it would have been Israeli PM Naftali Bennett, but the USA and UK (Boris Johnson especially) made sure that this time around, no peace deal would be allowed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yma0LxyVVs
Yuschenko, working with Bush on NATO for Ukraine, was hugely unpopular, had to fire all his ministers, he even lost to Yanukovich but hung on thanks to a coalition with Timushenko. And Cheney, McCain were all in on NATO too of course: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/cheney-angers-russia-by-urgi...
But in 2010 Yanukovich got elected, and started to roll back the NATO integrations. So NATO responded by -- get this -- undertaking the largest disarmament project in the world and destroying Ukraine's stocks of weapons! Source: their own website: https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_79035.htm?selectedLo...
Um.
Oh yeah, then McCain comes and riles up the EuroMaidan protestors to oust Yanukovich. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-ukraine-nato-idUKTRE6351E...
I can understand McCain, he was in a Soviet prison during the Afghan war. He really didn't like the Soviets / Russians. But they went ahead and tried to turn Ukraine into the next Afghanistan circa 1979: https://www.counterpunch.org/1998/01/15/how-jimmy-carter-and...
And by the way ... Ukraine is not as united as the media makes people believe about continuing the war. Half of Ukrainians want a quick negotiated end to it, but you won't hear that from Zelensky:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/653495/half-ukrainians-quick-ne...
Anyway ... Syria and Ukraine had become the kind of horrific proxy wars that characterized the cold war. Proxy wars have never really ended, it's just that we don't care about the ones that have been happening in Yemen, or right now in Sudan, even though they are huge and horrific:
No one in your media listens to the UN: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/10/un-warns-viole...
You don't hear about the 25 million people: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/02/sudan-25-mil...
We care about Ukraine because Russia. And we care about Gaza because Israel. And almost no one cares about Sudan, Yemen, or Rohingya, or anything like that. It's a sad situation.
Some data points might be correct, but you have not enough data to connect the dots, so you make wrong conclusions.
Russia was threatening with invading Ukraine right from the beginning of its recent independence.
There were two large schools of thoughts how to deal with it:
1) try to “go around rain drops” by not provoking Russia but simultaneously to not give up sovereignty
2) move as fast as possible and seek protection from NATO like baltics and other eastern europeans.
When Russia starts regaining power internally, it became much harder to “go around raindrops”, as russia start to perform FSB style operation to discredit Ukraine in the west and to enforce its will on the inside.
Kravchuk (2nd president), falls the victim of that when Ukraine was accused of selling weapons to counties under sanctions, which made him a pariah in the west.
Later he was accused of ordering of killing a journalist which made him a pariah on the inside.
Also it was time when Russia tried to make the first attempt of annexing Crimea by trying to get first island near it - (Tusla).
Kuchma was able to make some agreement with russia a relax the tensions.
Then russia decided that the next president have to be Yanukovych - a criminal with served jail time.
An opposed politician was Yuschenko, who was famous for his reforms on the national bank and was considered by the time a successful manager and politician.
What’s worse, Russia helped to rig the elections and later poison Yuschenko with dioxin.
This caused a first revolution.
Yuschinko understood very well what he was dealing with and saw the only salvation from NATO as the threats from Russia increased.
And so on, and so forth.
US was not in favor of Ukrainian independence for a very long time and never helped in any way, except for disarming. The first time US president arrived to Ukraine was to talk the parliament out of proclaiming independence.
Europe was always afraid of russia and very careful with Ukraine.
Russia was always threatening and tried to regain control over Ukraine - both politically, by sabotage, special operations and military.
Ukraine was looking for help and screaming that russia will attack sooner or later.
Ukraine consider itself to be part of Europe by values, and is fighting russia for more than a century already paying huge price.
NATO was considered the only way to finally stop this cycle, but with US withdrawing, it may seems that all of the struggle was in vain as Europe might not be capable to protect even itself.
1. You mentioned Crimea. Let's just start there for example. Here are things you as a Ukrainian might not know because I doubt this would have been taught in public education:
Even before Ukraine seceded from USSR, Crimea already wanted to be independent of Ukraine. 95% voted to secede from Ukraine but they were ignored:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Crimean_sovereignty_ref...
That same year, Ukraine voted to leave the USSR and a mere 54% of Crimea voted in favor. This is always cited as the basis for Crimea voting to "be part of Ukraine" but 54% is much lower than 95%, and the question was whether Ukraine would be independent of USSR, not Crimea from Ukraine.
You can see Crimea continued to want to be independent because in 1992 they declared a republic with its own self-government. They vote to elect their own President, which Kyiv denounces as unconstitutional: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Crimean_constitution
But Ukraine created a Ukrainian Presidential Representative in Crimea, kicking off a wave of protests there. Their 1994 referendum strongly supported autonomy and independence from Ukraine again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Crimean_referendum
The Crimean public popularly elect pro-Russian president Yuriy Meshkov. He clashes with the parliament. Ukrainian government intervenes in the crisis, invades Crimea with about 4000 officers, scraps their constitution, removes their President, and deports him to Russia. Kyiv appoints Anatoly Franchuk to run Crimea instead, rather than a popularly-elected leader.
Crimea was demanding autonomy from 1991-1993 and Kyiv agreed to give them this autonomy. It was only on this basis that Russia agreed to support Crimea being under Ukraine. But then in 1995 they renegged on it, and invaded it.
There is much more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Crimea_(1991%E2%80%...
So shouldn't this be mentioned when people talk about Crimean referendum in 2014 being "rigged" and "under Moscow influence and little green men"? What about Kyiv's influence and 4000 officers?"
Crimea protested against NATO presence since 2006: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/world/americas/11iht-kiev...
It makes sense since Crimea was originally under Russian SSR but got transferred in 1954 to Ukrainian SSR. A decade earlier, Stalin had deported 200,000 Crimean Tatars, in a horrific ethnic cleansing. But even before that, Russians were the majority there. So it's not surprising to me why they would want to be independent from Ukraine.
Funny enough, in the 2014 referendum the only two choices were "under Ukraine" or "under Russia". I think if they had a third choice, "independence from both countries", they'd choose that.
I am on neither country's side, I'm a libertarian, I just think there is a matreshka doll of countries wanting to control regions. Georgia wanted to bring Abhazia and South Ossetia under control, and was emboldened by NATO. Thankfully that whole war was averted quickly. I mean, heck, I strongly condemned Russia's bombing of Grozny, Chechnya. I condemn Erdogan's starving of Rojava region and diverting water from it. I condemn Stalin's role in Holodomor as much as I condemn the British role in the Irish Potato Famine. I don't think it's right for anyone to exercise force over large groups of people.
Libertarians would say a simple solution is just to allow both Russians, Ukrainians, Greeks, Jews, Tatars and others to visit Crimea, live there, own property, etc. There is no reason to fight about it. Having exactly one flag over every region on earth is not a principle worthy to have everyone killing each other over.
Ironically, when everyone is just provinces under one federation / union (Canada, USA, USSR) they think more sanely. When Crimea changed hands from Russian SSR to Ukrainian SSR in 1954, no one killed each other over it. They just changed road signs and moved on. They didn't try to divert water from it, Erdogan-style, as punishment. Why in the 21st century can't we have more approaches like that? Well, it seems we can, inside federations. Europe has stopped fighting under the EU, and it was horrific before. It's some kind of nationalistic / statist madness. Here is a statistic I want to leave you with: 11 million Russians have family members in Ukraine, and vice versa. Do you think they want to kill them? Those are stories of love, of people meeting and starting families, there are so many, why do we focus on stories of hate now? Because politicians. They fail to avert wars, due to their pride and incompetence, and refusing to listen to each other in good faith. Then for years they sip wine and give speeches about how "we" must fight until victory, while the plebs kill each other due to their failures. Plebs just want to make money and feed their family. That's my view.