I wouldn’t trust the US either, although having economic leverage helps. But are you referring to the Budapest memorandum with
They guaranteed Ukraine’s integrity in return for denuclearization
If yes I don’t understand how this misunderstanding still has to be corrected. Read it for yourself here (swapped link to something working, pdf warning)
At no point does it promise defense against foreign third-party attacks except in case nuclear weapons get involved. Every security assurance only covers the nation themselves. Something Russia has obviously broken (but there are no penalties stipulated), whereas the UK and USA have held up their part of the deal. Unless they have invaded Ukraine themselves without my knowledge.___
I am aware of the limitations of the wording in the Budapest memorandum. Note the exact words that I used.
Even if the wording was more explicit, do you honestly think Obama and the Americans wouldn’t chicken out in 2014 and would be willing to fight to kick out the Russians from Crimea?
Even if the wording was more explicit, do you honestly think Obama and the Americans wouldn’t chicken out in 2014 and would be willing to fight to kick out the Russians from Crimea?
That’s a difficult one to answer, but yeah it wouldn’t have been a certain thing. However i don’t think we’d have ever arrived in the same circumstances like 2014, had the US given explicit security guarantees.
They didn’t give those, because they didn’t have to and Ukraine wasn’t in a position to force the issue (similar maybe to how there wasn’t any formal pact regarding Russia and NATO’s expansion). But had they signed any explicit form of mutual defense arrangement i’d imagine that this would have lead them to build some form of permanent military presence in Ukraine. And that would almost certainly have changed everything. Would Russia ever dare to invade, if there was a US military base in Ukraine? And in that scenario i would answer your question with “yes, Obama/the Americans would likely not have chickened out and fought back”.
Agreed. If there were American bases in Crimea/Donbas, I don’t think the russians would have invaded in the first place.
I was refering more to a hypothetical scenario with a mutual defense treaty without bases. A situation where they would have to land in Crimea and start sinking the russian black feet and bombing Moscow.
I have my doubts they would act even with a treaty that used explicit wording around a russian invasion in context of mutual defense obligations. I think Obama would chicken out and cite some technicality.
In general, the impression I get is that US leadership in the last ~40 years has been subpar both in the foreign policy arena and in domestic matters.
Dont take this an an Anti-American rant. Our leadership was incompetent and corrupt. Poroshenko had a chance after the Revolution of Dignity, but he messed it up. Zelebakyy is probably the first leader of modern Ukraine that has been competent and has shown some level of achievement.
Maybe, but i am not sure about the usefulness of discussing such hypotheticals, especially because like i said i don’t think it there’d be a realistic chance of a serious defense pact happening without boots on the ground. For all their flaws in leadership i think there’s a very good reason why no defense pact was signed (or ever really on the table) and also why there never was any binding agreement limiting nato expansion (no matter what russia sometimes claims). Despite the many flaws in leadership i think that at that point politics at this level did follow some rules, unlike now with Trump where nothing can be trusted anymore.
For what it’s worth i assume in different scenarios there would always also be other ripple effects. Like Ukraine likely being more in the european sphere of influence. And the current level of conflict also didn’t happen out of the blue overnight. Could some territory like Crimera in 2014 be lost before the slow moving west takes action? Maybe yes. But after that we would have seen more involvement than in our timeline and russia massing large amounts of troops before the most recent invasion would have also seen a different response. There are more granular levels than doing nothing and bombing Moscow.
While I agree that such hypotheticals arent particularly useful, I will strongly disagree with the rest of your post.
Bush II did want to offer Ukraine and Moldova NATO membership in 2008, so it’s incorrect to claim that membership was never on the table.
His proposal was shot down by Merkel, who rewarded russia after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 with Nord Stream II.
This is not a matter of bombing Moscow, during the invasion of Crimea, Ukraine’s asked for any support in attempt to fight back russia’s annexation, these request were completely rejected.
Poland and the Baltic nations actively tried to warn Germany that russians aren’t going to reject genocidal imperialism just like that. These warnings were ignored primarily due to corruption (true of other countries like Austria) but also due to a tendency to white-wash russian crimes and a little bit of racism too.
Merkel and Obama were both corrupt, cowardly and fundamentally unreliable individuals.
Bush II did want to offer Ukraine and Moldova NATO membership in 2008, so it’s incorrect to claim that membership was never on the table.
I was still kind of hung up on the timeframe when the Budapest memorandum was made, where i don’t think it was on the table, but otherwise you are of course right and that’s a good point.
His proposal was shot down by Merkel, who rewarded russia after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 with Nord Stream II.
According to wikipedia plans for NS2 already started before that, but ofc that doesn’t change the fact that they just kept going ahead like nothing happened.
This is not a matter of bombing Moscow, during the invasion of Crimea, Ukraine’s asked for any support in attempt to fight back russia’s annexation, these request were completely rejected.
Yes, but that wasn’t from chickening out because of some technicallity. Since as far as i am aware there was no legal requirement to get out of. Should they from a moral and also long term stategic point of you have intervened? Absolutely, but i feel that wasn’t the point in question.
Merkel and Obama were both corrupt, cowardly and fundamentally unreliable individuals.
I actually wouldn’t call Merkel unreliable, i think she was pretty consistent in her passivity just trying to stay popular while holding on to a unsustainable system. As far as corruption goes i am weirdly not sure about that either, since she doesn’t seem to have captialized on anything personally, unlike plenty of other people. I guess it depends on whether or not one equals allowing corruption to happen, as being corrupt.
In a grand scheme of things though the damage she has done is truly immeasurable.
I wouldn’t trust the US either, although having economic leverage helps. But are you referring to the Budapest memorandum with
If yes I don’t understand how this misunderstanding still has to be corrected. Read it for yourself here (swapped link to something working, pdf warning)
At no point does it promise defense against foreign third-party attacks except in case nuclear weapons get involved. Every security assurance only covers the nation themselves. Something Russia has obviously broken (but there are no penalties stipulated), whereas the UK and USA have held up their part of the deal. Unless they have invaded Ukraine themselves without my knowledge.___
I am aware of the limitations of the wording in the Budapest memorandum. Note the exact words that I used.
Even if the wording was more explicit, do you honestly think Obama and the Americans wouldn’t chicken out in 2014 and would be willing to fight to kick out the Russians from Crimea?
Sorry, if i missinterpreted your post.
That’s a difficult one to answer, but yeah it wouldn’t have been a certain thing. However i don’t think we’d have ever arrived in the same circumstances like 2014, had the US given explicit security guarantees.
They didn’t give those, because they didn’t have to and Ukraine wasn’t in a position to force the issue (similar maybe to how there wasn’t any formal pact regarding Russia and NATO’s expansion). But had they signed any explicit form of mutual defense arrangement i’d imagine that this would have lead them to build some form of permanent military presence in Ukraine. And that would almost certainly have changed everything. Would Russia ever dare to invade, if there was a US military base in Ukraine? And in that scenario i would answer your question with “yes, Obama/the Americans would likely not have chickened out and fought back”.
Agreed. If there were American bases in Crimea/Donbas, I don’t think the russians would have invaded in the first place.
I was refering more to a hypothetical scenario with a mutual defense treaty without bases. A situation where they would have to land in Crimea and start sinking the russian black feet and bombing Moscow.
I have my doubts they would act even with a treaty that used explicit wording around a russian invasion in context of mutual defense obligations. I think Obama would chicken out and cite some technicality.
In general, the impression I get is that US leadership in the last ~40 years has been subpar both in the foreign policy arena and in domestic matters.
Dont take this an an Anti-American rant. Our leadership was incompetent and corrupt. Poroshenko had a chance after the Revolution of Dignity, but he messed it up. Zelebakyy is probably the first leader of modern Ukraine that has been competent and has shown some level of achievement.
Maybe, but i am not sure about the usefulness of discussing such hypotheticals, especially because like i said i don’t think it there’d be a realistic chance of a serious defense pact happening without boots on the ground. For all their flaws in leadership i think there’s a very good reason why no defense pact was signed (or ever really on the table) and also why there never was any binding agreement limiting nato expansion (no matter what russia sometimes claims). Despite the many flaws in leadership i think that at that point politics at this level did follow some rules, unlike now with Trump where nothing can be trusted anymore.
For what it’s worth i assume in different scenarios there would always also be other ripple effects. Like Ukraine likely being more in the european sphere of influence. And the current level of conflict also didn’t happen out of the blue overnight. Could some territory like Crimera in 2014 be lost before the slow moving west takes action? Maybe yes. But after that we would have seen more involvement than in our timeline and russia massing large amounts of troops before the most recent invasion would have also seen a different response. There are more granular levels than doing nothing and bombing Moscow.
While I agree that such hypotheticals arent particularly useful, I will strongly disagree with the rest of your post.
Bush II did want to offer Ukraine and Moldova NATO membership in 2008, so it’s incorrect to claim that membership was never on the table.
His proposal was shot down by Merkel, who rewarded russia after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 with Nord Stream II.
This is not a matter of bombing Moscow, during the invasion of Crimea, Ukraine’s asked for any support in attempt to fight back russia’s annexation, these request were completely rejected.
Poland and the Baltic nations actively tried to warn Germany that russians aren’t going to reject genocidal imperialism just like that. These warnings were ignored primarily due to corruption (true of other countries like Austria) but also due to a tendency to white-wash russian crimes and a little bit of racism too.
Merkel and Obama were both corrupt, cowardly and fundamentally unreliable individuals.
I was still kind of hung up on the timeframe when the Budapest memorandum was made, where i don’t think it was on the table, but otherwise you are of course right and that’s a good point.
According to wikipedia plans for NS2 already started before that, but ofc that doesn’t change the fact that they just kept going ahead like nothing happened.
Yes, but that wasn’t from chickening out because of some technicallity. Since as far as i am aware there was no legal requirement to get out of. Should they from a moral and also long term stategic point of you have intervened? Absolutely, but i feel that wasn’t the point in question.
I actually wouldn’t call Merkel unreliable, i think she was pretty consistent in her passivity just trying to stay popular while holding on to a unsustainable system. As far as corruption goes i am weirdly not sure about that either, since she doesn’t seem to have captialized on anything personally, unlike plenty of other people. I guess it depends on whether or not one equals allowing corruption to happen, as being corrupt.
In a grand scheme of things though the damage she has done is truly immeasurable.
That’s a fair take, even though I disagree with some details.
I don’t think Merkel was personally corrupt (that would be Schröder), but she definitely enabled russian corruption in the EU (and beyond).
Sorry about that, i think the brackets in the wikipedia-link somehow messed up the formating. I swapped out the link to another one from the UN.
Golli is right regarding the wording of the Budapest memorandum, it isn’t explicit at all.
I would even agree that perhaps technically “the UK and USA have held up their part of the deal”.
Nothing in my OP denies this, I am talking about a more general evaluation of the reliability of the US.
I don’t have an opinion either way, I haven’t read it. I’m just pointing out that the link they added doesn’t seem to lead anywhere.
Yes, the link didn’t work.
I am from Ukraine, so I didn’t need the link. :)