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.
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.
Don’t get me wrong. Im glad we don’t have troops there but im ashamed there is even debate around if we should be supplying ukraine.
@Hopfgeist @HubertManne
I am ashamed that the UK did not honour this agreement.
They did. What the UK, the US and Russia(!) should do in case Ukraine is attacked, is to “seek immediate UN Security Council action” to provide assistance. Which the UK and the US did. Of course, that didn’t achieve anything because of the veto powers of the permanent UN Security council member Russia.