One of Russia’s prime reasons for annexing Crimea and invading Ukraine was to control Ukraine’s oil, gas, and mineral reserves so that it cannot arise as an economic competitor. If Joe Biden and the West had clean hands, they could have publicized this and shown Putin as basically an armed robber taking everything its neighbor had, leaving it an impoverished backwater with no future.
I’m all for negotiating something reasonable, but Putin cannot be rewarded for using aggression to seize everything he wanted from the start. He’ll only do it again and again.
That’s why we should allow the Ukes their Nukes. They want aggressive neutrality, they can have it. Nukes with plenty of UN inspectors up their backside. Authorized WMDs.
They already HAD nukes and gave them up, for assurances of sovereignty. Those assurances turned out to be empty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Security_Assurances
Nailed it. Well done.