? They had nuclear weapons, but gave them up in a treaty with Russia in exchange for security guarantees. Russia betrayed Ukraine by violating that treaty by the Crimea invasion in 2014. See the Budapest Memorandum [0]
What an interesting way to misquote this. The signatories of the memorandum were: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, russia, United States and United Kingdom.
Arguably, the ongoing policy of the US administration w.r.t. of strike prohibitions is in violation of the memorandum terms. Obviously, russia egregiously violated the memorandum as well as a multitude of (now effectively non-functional) international laws and has committed a large amount of crimes against humanity it was not and still isn't held accountable for.
Interesting question, and actually the answer could be no (surprisingly). Some US nukes use varying compositions of high explosives in the primary stage. You have to set them off in a particular order, and that's the launch code (or part of it presumably). Even possessing the nukes, it would be hard to work out that sequence, since testing the explosives is destructive. And if you fire them in the wrong order, the primary fizzles and the bomb doesn't work.
(I've no idea if the Russian weapons used such a system)
US and UK are parties in the same treaty as guarantors that provided "security assurances". US pressured Ukraine into signing the treaty so they are partly to blame for it.
Context: If your non-democratically installed government wants EU and Nato membership against the majority of citizens...that absolutely undermines Ukraine's national sovereignty.
But that is probably why you cut it out of context, and the rest is "too many instances to unpack".
The writer of the article is Lee Jones Professor of Political Economy and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London.
If your non-democratically installed government wants EU and Nato membership against the majority of citizens...that absolutely undermines Ukraine's national sovereignty.
Here's what I mean by "too much to unpack":
(1) If your non-democratically installed government
Not true in regard to the events you are referring to (at least to a first-order approximation). Let's just say I could easily tell you why this take wrong if we had time, but because there's so much to unpack, we don't. All I can recommend is -- please check your assumptions, and do your own research.
(2) If, hypothetically, a government (democratic, autocratic, or somewhere in between) makes a decision that goes against whatever the latest polls of the moment happen to say -- no, that does not mean it is "undermining the country's national sovereignty". That's just not what "sovereignty" means. If you don't fully understand this, you need to stop right now and look into what the term actually does mean.
(3) At no point since 2010 has any government in Ukraine attempted to push for NATO membership against the tide of public opinion in Ukraine. This is a pure and simple fact, and I strongly recommend you roll up your sleeves, do the basic research and determine the valdity of what I just said, on your own, all by yourself. In particular, the years 2010 and 2014 will be very important in your analysis.
(4) I'm pretty sure the situation is exactly the same with regard to EU membership, though it's not a matter I've looked into directly. However, the infinitely bigger matter of concern for you should be: if it's your belief that this is not the case, then why do you believe this? Is it something you've looked into directly -- or just something you think you might have heard somewhere?
(5) Nevermind the author's credentials. Just consider the statement on its own terms. It literally doesn't matter at all who said it, or what their credentials are.
Academics are people like anyone else, and it turns out many of them are just as susceptible to propaganda and muddled / ideology-perturbed thinking like anyone you will meet on the street. Some even way more so, in fact. Precisely because society has told them that they're so darn smart, and that people will just automatically believe whatever they say.
The "West" is in for selling weapon and destabilize Russia, you should be naive to think that our interest goes deeper than that. And indeed Taiwan or Georgia should take notice.
Given how this site is generally a pro-market tech business place, it should be obvious to people that there are deals in which both parties benefit. US-Ukraine relationship is definitely win-win.
in this case also Russia is benefiting a lot, too much even, their economy is overheating and the unemployment rate is way too low. So this war is a deal that is making everybody happy it seems. The only poor fuckers are the soldiers fighting on the ground.
"Betray" isn't really the right term, the west were clear from the start that they were in this to bleed Russia and were only planning to provide enough weapons to keep the conflict simmering in a bloody fashion. Ukraine hopefully understood that they were just running out the clock in the hope that something miraculous would happen on the way through. It still might, wars are unpredictable.
We've already gone far beyond the limits of sanity in Ukraine. There is no upside, lots of potential downside and the stench of hypocrisy follows everyone who contributed to the recent expeditions into Iraq and Afghanistan that look mighty similar to what Russia was doing but wasn't met with anything more than shrugs and harsh language. It is a profound mystery why only one of the 3 needs to be escalated like what has been done.
> "Betray" isn't really the right term, the west were clear from the start that they were in this to bleed Russia and were only planning to provide enough weapons to keep the conflict simmering in a bloody fashion.
With which mr. West have you talked about it that he's been so clear?
As far as I know, "the West" is a collection of many countries, many decision/opinion makers. There's no singular motivation for supporting Ukraine, and there are many other, less cynical motivations than what you insinuate.
I sometimes think Americans are "shrewd" in a sense that "Hey, I don't fully understand the system we are in but through some trickle down effects, we are at the top so why bother questioning anything."
It's not a mystery. The US, the UK and France ratified the Budapest memorandum. Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons in return for security assurances.
No such treaties existed for Iraq nor Afghanistan.
This is a popular narrative but really, those nukes were a burden on Ukraine and nothing more -- the forces possessing and maintaining those weapons reported to Russia and any launch needed authorization from the Чегет the Russian head of state held, whoever that was. Sure, they were on Ukrainian land but that was all. That is why Ukraine so easily surrendered all those weapons for extremely weak reassurances. If you were to read the text https://policymemos.hks.harvard.edu/files/policymemos/files/... you would notice how there's no real security guarantee whatsoever. Basically it says if someone nukes or threatens to nuke Ukraine they will "seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine".
Sure, there are words saying "the Russian Federation [...] reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine [...] to respect the Independence and Sovereignty
and the existing borders of Ukraine" but what if they don't? tough luck. No one promised help, there's no built in penalty mechanism, nothing.
I’m sure that over the years they could have reverse engineered the bombs and reused the warheads for more tactical strikes into Russian even if they could maintain the ICBM versions. It’s not like there weren’t a lot of nuke engineers and scientists in Ukraine when they split up the Soviet Empire
This brings up a very old memory: the readme of Volkov Commander said the author of it is some nuclear institute in Kyiv. Yup.
(Also, I uploaded Volkov Commander to SIMTEL 31 years ago and the ignorant asshole running that site reported me to the university for pirating Norton Commander and they banned me from the university VAX leading me straight to Linux. Funny how that worked out.)
