Given that the USA and UK (as well as Russia, Khazakhstan and Belarus) signed up to providing Ukraine with aid in the event that it got invaded by anybody, your GIF doesn’t really do anything more than prove the USA took its lasting treaty obligations seriously whether or not Russia does the same.
If the USA doesn’t like having its hands bound by a treaty, the USA can withdraw from it. It has done so on multiple occasions.
The USA didn’t withdraw from the Budapest Memorandum. Ask yourself why. My guess is, all the way from 1993 to 2014 the USA convinced itself that nobody would be stupid enough to attack a country that had three nuclear powers compelled by treaty to come to its defence... and forgot the Putin factor.
Putin doesn’t respect any international law, doesn’t accept any authority other than his own, and the UK and USA signatures on that agreement didn’t matter one bit to Putin once he got it into his head that Ukraine needed to be dragged by its ankles back into the orbit of Moscow.
Long before Maidan, Putin orchestrated the attempted assassination of Viktor Yushchenko for no reason other than he wanted to see Viktor Yanukovych INSTALLED as President without any challenge.
Yanukovych won the election without Putin’s help because, oddly enough, Ukraine didn’t see his being pro-Russian as a big enough problem to vote against him. But the sheer fact Putin tore up the Budapest agreement to make that move is what set the ball rolling. Ukraine turned against its eastern neighbor even more after Poland warned Kyiv in 2008 that whatever Putin was doing in Georgia, he’d soon be doing in Kyiv.
And the Polish warning was correct. Five years later, frustrated at having failed diplomatically to divert the eyes of the Azarov and Yanukovych government from the general direction of the European Union, Putin somehow managed to get both of them to completely U-turn on their pro-EU stance and toe the Kremlin line.
He didn’t do that with a charm offensive. Either he put the frighteners on them, or they sold out.
Russia doesn’t feel at all bound to its commitments under the Belovezha, Minsk and Budapest agreements and thought that the ability of Ukraine to call on others to aid it if invaded would fall on deaf ears. Unfortunately for Russia, the UK and USA take their treaty obligations far too seriously to ignore that call - and most of eastern Europe, despite not being signatories themselves - stepped up too.
Patrushev’s gone on the record (again) confirming that Russia’s really got a bee in its bonnet about the cultural capital America enjoys across Europe (without pointing out that this is largely with the consent of Europe, though) and the USA sidelining Russia. In his opinion, the Russia that has nothing going for it that Europe wants other than oil, gas and grain is going to be as influential in Europe as the Russian Empire and Soviet Union were.
https://vk.com/@580896205-patrushev-interview-with-rossiyskaya-gazeta-27-march
“The U.S. dominates Europe, ignoring the fact that Russia has historically played a leading role on the continent. In the XIX century - the Russian Empire, in the XX century - the Soviet Union. So it will be in the twenty-first century.”
Tell me, in all seriousness, would you like the sound of that if you’d grown up in the shadow of the Soviet Union? Most of eastern Europe has been listening to this kind of bullshit for twenty years and it took the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2014 to wake the USA and UK up to the possibility that Putin wasn’t just a sad old butt-hurt Soviet nostalgia freak, whistling Dixie.
Putin wasn’t bluffing when he said he viewed NATO expansion as a threat to Russia. But he was also saying, the real reason he sees it that way is because he had this wonderful fantasy of having Soviet tanks back in Berlin, and he really hated having the US and EU NATO umbrellas getting in the way of him realising that dream.