Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/9912794
While a US commitment that NATO would not expand towards Russia was made during talks with the Soviets in 1990, and remains a topic of heated dispute, no undertaking was written into the treaty on German reunification.
Didn’t Russia promise that if Ukrainian got rid of nukes they would leave them alone?
Yeah. The whole reason there’s a war right now is Russia ignoring its own promises.
Maybe Ukraine should get its nukes back.
Ukraine never had effective control of the nuclear warheads, although they had physical control and probably could have made them unusable, but not fire them without some serious reverse-engineering and possibly rebuilding large parts.
Just a touch of rhetoric, I’m really only pointing out how hard it is to deal with Russia in good faith
Yes, and that was codified by all signatories of the Budapest Memorandum. Russia tries to argue that it hasn’t violated the terms because it only uses weapons against another signatory state “in self-defense”, which is an agreed exception. Everyone knows it’s ludicrous, but apparently even Russia does not want to be perceived as violating agreements.
not only leave them alone but protect them from other aggressors as did the us. This is one of the things with folks who complain about the material assitance. We are actually being sorta weenie as we sorta promised to have troops really. So its a we are doing the least to meet our obligations situation.
The US and the UK were signatories to the Budapest Memorandum (all three memoranda, actually, there are similar ones with Belarus and Kazakhstan), but it was never intended as a mutual assistance treaty in the way the North Atlantic Treaty (the “NAT” part of “NATO”) is. It was just an agreement to respect each other’s territorial integrity and not to use weapons against each other. It literally says:
The cop-out clause, of course, was “except in self-defence”, which is what Russia implicitly claims, when saying that its citizens in Donbas, and thus Russia itself, were under attack by Ukraine. Playing the victim has always been the preferred way to justify a war of aggression.
The part about giving up the nuclear weapons is implicit in the preamble which welcomes Ukraine to the non-proliferation treaty as a non-nuclear-weapon state.
The whole Memorandum is also really short, literally fits on a single page: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ukraine._Memorandum_on_Security_Assurances
I mean number 4 though:
The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and The United States of America reaffirm their commitment to seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine, as a non-nuclear-weapon state party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used.
granted that says UN but given the US history we usually acti if the UN will not.
@HubertManne @0x815 @coffeejunky @Hopfgeist
The US fell, and nobody over there noticed.
The US is incable of any decisive action.
It is in a state of political paralysis.
They did say that they ‘might’ ban Tiktok in six months though.
@Hopfgeist @HubertManne
I am ashamed that the UK did not honour this agreement.