True. Yuschenko was poisoned at the behest of Russia to ensure the more pro-Russian Yanukovych won the election, despite Yanukovych already taking the lead in that democratic election.
Kazan and the other Putin fluffers conveniently ignore facts like that. Russia didn’t suddenly decide to start violating the Budapest Memorandum in 2013, they’d been at it gor years prior.
When the Putin regime complains about provocation they skip the bit where Ukraine could’ve invoked the USA and UK signature commitments all the way back to 2008 when Poland reminded Ukraine of the assassination AND pointed to the invasion of Georgia AND said the evidence was already there that Russia was committed to violating Ukraine’s independence evrn more.
The West invited Russia into the Council of Europe, the European sports and entertainment competitions, multiple trade and research bodies, WHILE Russia was sending spies and hitman into European capitols.
That’s almost a dereliction of duty in looking so far in the other direction to avoid poking the bear.
Fact is, Russia KEPT crossing the line before Maidan; and totally overstepped it when the little green men arrived in Donbas and Crimea (after Yanukovych had been muscled into taking Russian citizenship, looting a few billion, and ordering Ukraine’s defence forces to stand aside for the Russian takeover)
The history curriculum in the future will have a whole semester dedicated to the question, with Russia copying the 1930s playbook and MULTIPLE binding treaties already in place making it likely that any cultural, political, economic or military invasion of Ukraine by Russia had the potential to drag NATO members in to defend it, how long did the USA and UK sit on their hands?
We are where we are for two reasons:
1. Russia has been hell bent on fuelling a cultural war if not a full hostile takeover with Ukraine as the battlefield, for as long as Putin’s been reading Dugin.
2. Despite knowing how World War 1 started, and despite the litany of harbingers including assassinations, and despite the obvious existence of treaty triggers, the EU and the USA bent over backwards to ignore the obvious.
NATO article 5 is the reason Russia doesn’t yomp into Poland. But Budapest had similar trigger clauses. If one state that handed Soviet nukes to Russia gets invaded, all of them PLUS the USA and UK can be drafted in to deal with the invasion.
It is that simple.
In hindsight we should’ve ensured that the 1975 OCS principles, the first Minsk agreement, the Belovezha Accords from the end of the Cold War, the UN Charter recognition of former Soviet republics, and finally the Budapest Memorandum, COMBINED, were just as enforceable as NATO article 5, maybe then Putin wouldn’t have assumed that we’d all look the other way if Russia attempted to impose ANY form of direct rule over Belarus, Khazakstan or Ukraine without the full, free and fair consent of their people.
Addendum: Baker’s assurances and Bush’s were verbal assurances for consumption by the Supreme Soviet and the leader of the USSR, not concrete written guarantees that could be adopted by any president of any independent country post Soviet - including Russia.
Even Gorbachev went on the record to say that all obligations in respect of NATO expansion into SOVIET UNION territory were fulfiled in full.
The minute Russia signed off on the UN Charter recognition of former Soviet republics and countries formerly in the Warsaw Pact, formally with Presidential signatures assurances on NATO expansion that were never even formally drafted let alone signed, completely ceased to be relevant.
There are those who dispute that... I’d say to them, even Russia had the right to apply to join NATO after the end of the Cold War. Their application might even have been approved if they’d made the slightest effort to do what Germany did after World War 2, ie prove that the modern state had abandoned the aggressive expansionist mentality that its predecessors had been notorious for.