Are Russia, the UK, Northern Ireland, and the US Violating the 1994 Budapest Memorandum Treaty To Protect Ukraine’s Sovereignty? [TREATY]

As the world is watching Russian military forces invade Ukraine, all kinds of talk is going on about why NATO is not lifting a finger to help defend Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy‘s country. They claim it’s because Ukraine is not a member of NATO. Okay, fair enough.

But what about the treaty that was agreed upon that everyone involved, including the United States, is now in violation?

When the Soviet Union became the Russian Federation, they wanted the nuclear missiles returned that they installed in Ukraine behind the protection of the Iron Curtain in the heyday of the Soviet communist domination over Eastern Europe.

Ukraine agreed to give back those nukes in return for Russia’s vow to acknowledge and respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and its territorial borders. This agreement was a treaty that was Western-sponsored, under what became known as the Budapest Memorandum.

Vladimir Putin‘s ongoing invasion of Ukraine should have stirred up the post Cold War treaty over Ukraine’s nuclear weapons that resulted in Kyiv giving up its nuclear arsenal upon the vows of the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland, and the United States to acknowledge Ukraine’s sovereignty and its territorial borders and to protect the same.

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That is still in force today, some 28 years later, but you would never know it. Our misinformation news media doesn’t want to talk about it.

The United States had the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, followed in second place by the Soviet Union, and most people don’t know this, but Ukraine came in with the world’s third largest nuclear stockpile. Ukraine boasted at least 1,900 strategic nuclear warheads that they inherited from the former Soviet Union.

Believe it or not, that amount of nuclear warheads was “more than six times the number of nuclear warheads that China currently possesses,” according to former US ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer, who is also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

If Ukraine still had that nuclear arsenal today, things would have been very different, as the Russian president would have been deterred from invading the country and from publicly making nuclear threats the way he has done more than once during this current conflict.

So, the point is that not only is Russia violating the treaty agreement under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum where the Russian Federation vowed “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine,” but the United Kingdom and the United States are violating the treaty as well, because they, along with Northern Ireland, entered into the treaty agreeing to recognize Ukraine’s sovereignty and to protect it.

Moscow vowed “to refrain from the threat or use of force” against the sovereign country of Ukraine under that deal. And so, the current Russian invasion of Ukraine violates that 1994 deal.

“Russia is in violation of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 when it, together with the US and the UK, promised to uphold Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity if Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons,” says Matthew Bryza, the former US ambassador to Azerbaijan.

Do you remember back in 2014 when Russia invaded Crimea and annexed the Black Sea region from Ukraine? Remember when the Obama-Biden administration did absolutely nothing to fulfill the 1994 Budapest Memorandum treaty? My bad. They did provide blankets. #EyeRoll

Pro-Russian separatists in the same year said that parts of the Donbass region in south-eastern Ukraine along the border, two regions known as the DPR and the LPR. These regions are each about the size of a typical US county, so they’re a fairly large amount of land. They declared their independence from Ukraine and the leaders visited Moscow and asked Putin if he would recognize them as independent states. Putin eventually agreed, and he agreed to protect them. But remember, he also agreed to recognize Ukraine’s sovereignty too.

So, Russia has been recognizing those two regions as independent states, but Ukraine hasn’t. It would be along the lines of Michigan and Vermont declaring they are no longer a part of the United States and they went to the soy boy Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and asked him to recognize them as independent states and Trudeau said, “Sure. Why not?”

Both of Russia’s actions against Ukraine, the Crimea invasion in 2014 and the current invasion of all of Ukraine, are a clear violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty that Russia agreed to along with Western countries of the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland, and the United States that President Bill Clinton signed.

“Russia has broken virtually all the commitments it undertook in that document,” Pifer said.

The United States made a promise, in writing, to protect the sovereignty of Ukrainian borders. President Barack Obama failed to honor that treaty and his vice president, now President Joe Biden, is failing to honor the same agreement and is hiding behind the NATO argument. We have the legal and moral obligation to protect Ukraine’s right to exist as an independent nation with full sovereignty.

As of right now, Ukraine is the only country in the Budapest Memorandum treaty that has not violated it and it’s wrong. The situation can be fixed, but don’t hold your breath for Joe Biden to step up and do the right thing. He doesn’t have to send US troops into Ukraine. All he has to do is go to the world and demand that Putin honor the treaty his country agreed to honor, but he won’t because he is a weak president. He could build a coalition against the Russian invasion, but that would probably interfere with his Matlock reruns.

“There was no military commitment by the US and the UK to do so,” said Matthew Bryza, the former US ambassador to Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic referring to the two country’s obligation to protect the sovereignty of Ukraine during the 2014 invasion of Crimea. But he was talking about an Article 5 of NATO and there was no obligation of that because Ukraine is not a member of NATO.

Bryza also said, “However, I argued that the US and the UK are upholding their commitments to help uphold Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity through the political and economic support they have shown to Ukraine, especially by unprecedentedly tough sanctions on Russia.”

Then the assurances and/or guarantees the US and UK gave during the treaty meant absolutely nothing if sanctions failed, and they have obviously failed, and they allow Russia to continue to violate the treaty. The understanding by Ukraine at the time was military intervention in case Russia violated the treaty.

Now, the Brookings’ senior fellow Pifer is explaining a classic Clintonian parsing to saying, “when negotiating the security assurances, US officials told their Ukrainian counterparts that, were Russia to violate them, the United States would take a strong interest and respond.”

He then goes on to argue the parse, saying that there is a difference between assurances and guarantees, claiming that the latter “implied a commitment of American military force.” The gist of it is it’s not clear how the Ukrainians understood US assurances in 1994 and whether they differentiated from guarantees.

I guess it depends on what the definition of “is,” is. #AnotherEyeRoll

Give me a break! The Ukrainians didn’t give up their nukes for a pansy assurance vs a guarantee argument over whether their sovereignty would be secured by the UK, Northern Ireland, and the United States. And don’t put it past Biden to use this parsing to weasel out of our obligation.