In exchange for giving up its nuclear arsenal, Ukraine initially sought legally binding guarantees from the US that it would intervene should Ukraine’s sovereignty be breached. But when it became clear that the US was not willing to go that far, Ukraine agreed to somewhat weaker – but nevertheless significant – politically binding security assurances to respect its independence and sovereignty which guaranteed its existing borders.
The only action the US could take was to have conversations.
That is not just “somewhat weaker” assurance. It is “no” assurance.
And, we promised the Russians no eastward expansion of NATO and not only expand to their borders, we fomented an illegal coup in Ukraine that installed a puppet government hostile to Russia and the ethnic Russian population in Ukraine.
Stop pretending this is about honor and ethics. We lost the moral high ground in 2014 if not earlier.
In exchange for giving up its nuclear arsenal, Ukraine initially sought legally binding guarantees from the US that it would intervene should Ukraine’s sovereignty be breached.
The United States joined with Russia to tag team Ukraine to give up the nukes in order to receive international recognition. Nobody wanted a Yugoslavia with nukes. Only Russia had the codes, and the missiles were targeted at the U.S. The missiles had a minimum range of 5,000 Km and were not much use for targeting Russia unless they wanted to hit something 5,000 Km east.
According to V. Vasylenko, “Ukraine had to give up nuclear weapons for it to become sovereign state and its independent status to be recognized all over the world.”
Ukraine's forgotten security guarantee: The Budapest Memorandum
DW News [German]
Date 05.12.2014
[Excerpts]
Twenty years ago, the Budapest Memorandum marked the end of many years of negotiations between the successor states of the Soviet Union and leading Western nuclear powers. Ukraine had a special place in the talks.After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the eastern European country inherited 176 strategic and more than 2,500 tactical nuclear missiles. Ukraine at that point had the third-largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world after the United States and Russia.
But Leonid Kravchuk, then the president of Ukraine, told DW that was only formally the case. De facto, Kyiv was powerless.
"All the control systems were in Russia. The so-called black suitcase with the start button, that was with Russian president Boris Yeltsin."
Western pressure
Ukraine could have kept the nuclear weapons, but the price would have been enormous, Kravchuk says. Though the carrier rockets were manufactured in the southern Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk, the nuclear warheads were not. It would have been too expensive for Ukraine to manufacture and maintain them on its own.
"It would have cost us $65 billion (53 billion euros), and the state coffers were empty," Kravchuk said.
Additionally, the West threatened Ukraine with isolation since the missiles were supposedly aimed at the United States. Therefore, "the only possible decision" was to give up the weapons, according to Kravchuk.
[...]
"Nowhere does it say that if a country violates this memorandum, that the others will attack militarily," said Gerhard Simon, Eastern Europe expert at the University of Cologne.
German journalist and Ukraine expert Winfried Schneider-Deters agrees, telling DW, "The agreement is not worth the paper on which it was written."
Nobody ever volunteered to guarantee Ukraine boots on the ground military support.
The real purpose of the Budapest Memorandum was to give the Ukrainian politicians just enough political cover so that they could sign away the nukes they could neither use nor maintain. Russia and the U.S. refused to recognize Ukraine until it happened. The specific requirement mandated was that Ukraine join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear nation before recognition.
Ukraine had already signed the Lisbon Protocol of 1991, along with Belarus, Kazakhstan, the U.S. and Russia (PROTOCOL TO THE TREATY BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND THE UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS ON THE REDUCTION AND LIMITATION OF STRATEGIC OFFENSIVE ARMS).