Ukraine, Nukes, Europe, and Responsibility
What is a Security Guaranty for the US worth?
Ukraine, in various forms has existed for over 1,100 years. It was the first “Rus”. Separately - later - there was a “Rus” of Moscovy (it moved to Tver briefly). They have been co-existing, sometimes peacefully, with Moscow usually having the upper hand. Several conflicts brewing in the world are about who lays claim to land (the Israelis certainly have a longer case than the Palestinian moslems). Lately we’ve had amazing displays of ignorance and arrogance from our President and his boy-wonder Elon. Apparently, early in the 2022 war (while Biden was in office), Russian scum-in-chief Putin had an hour long phone call with Elon where he explained why, in Vladimir’s imperialist mind, Russia and Ukraine are indistinguishable. Apparently Elon initially believed Putin’s story until he was taught better. There is a lot of confusion not just about the past hundreds of years ago, but even recent history when it comes to Ukraine, Russia and the US. This is a subject I know a good bit about and will maybe clear things up.
Ukraine was captured into the USSR during World War II (the early 1940s). Parts of Ukraine had been in the Czarist Russia or the USSR in the past, but borders and regimes shift. The Soviet Union (USSR) ended1 in 1991, and Ukraine became an independent republic in 1991. At the time, Ukraine had almost 2,000 nuclear warheads, plus missiles and bombers to launch them with. Ironically (dark irony) the Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk was called “rocket city” since there was such a large concentration of USSR aerospace and military production there. Upon the USSR’s demise, Russia wanted to gather up and dispose of all the warheads from Ukraine and Kazakstan, and Belarus. The latter two countries have remained close to Moscow, so getting their nukes was not that difficult for Moscow. Ukraine, had a long and awful history with Russia so was not as keen to give up their nuclear arms to Russia, plus Russia had stolen quite a bit of money from Ukraine upon the breakup from the USSR.
About 1993, Ukraine started to balk at giving up its weapons without many conditions. There was a trilateral summit in 1994 that included the US, Ukraine and Russia. The parties agreed Ukraine would give up its warheads and be paid for the value of highly enriched uranium, as well as receiving security guarantees from the US and Russia.2 In 1994, in exchange for agreeing to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Ukraine received more economic and security guarantees in the so-called Budapest Memorandum that included security guarantees to Ukraine from Russia, the US and the UK.3
In retrospect we can see that a guarantee from Russia is worth absolutely noting, particularly with Putin in power. But anyone who tells you that the US (and UK) has no obligations to Ukraine is either a fool or a knave. We have elected a knave as president of the US, but decent people should realize we have made many explicit commitments to Ukraine. Ukraine has destroyed about 1/3rd of Russia’s armed forces in this war, something that the US and NATO might have otherwise had to do. Still, the threat of nuclear attack by Russia hangs over Ukraine. If we are going to back off commitments that we’ve made (perhaps Trump’s only talent) then many people will want to get nuclear weapons to have a deterrent. Another SubStacker I like, Noah Smith, wrote about this recently and the immediate nature of the threat(s).4 Again, Trump is making America FAR FROM GREAT.
As an aside to readers, I spent some time in post-Soviet, pre-Putin, Russia in the 1990s. Besides that, my wife and I lived in Ukraine as well. (Once when I was flying to Moscow I met several Americans who were going on a disarmament trip to Russia, the kind where you go out in the middle of nowhere to look at missile silos and so forth). Ukraine and Russia are not the same countries. They have a long history of being close, but never equal. Russia never dominated the entirety of Ukraine until WWII, and has been ghastly to them.
When we lived in Kyiv, my wife and I would often hire a car and driver. Our driver was a lovely man, who as a nickname I’ll call Volody. He had a nice Volga car and was a retired Soviet Air Force fighter pilot. He’d gone to Iraq long ago to train Iraqis to fly MIG jets. He had a good enough life in Ukraine, even late in life. He told me once (I’m an Air Force vet) “once you’ve flown a fighter plane as fast as you can there’s not more in life” (I paraphrase). Anyhow, despite his background, he was very nationalist Ukrainian. I recall driving with him and a radio story played about some action by Russia (this was about the time of the later Bosnian wars) to intimidate one of its neighbors. I had a non-committal reaction, and he bristled, ‘it’s imperialism!’ He would cut the Russians no slack. Neither should we. The Russians have broken many promises to Ukraine over the centuries. The US should not break our promises to Ukraine. That would be a disgrace and a tragedy.
Vladimir Putin, one of the 21st century’s biggest creeps has called the dissolution of the Soviet Union “the greatest historical mistake of the 20th century”. No, not WWII with 50 million dead and Nazi death camps murdering away; not the deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainians and Russians by the Soviet government in the 1930s; not all the other disasters that cost thousands and millions of souls. No, Vladimir thinks a peaceful political action was the biggest disaster.
Unbeknownst to many people, the US has used uranium from both Ukraine and Russia collected in the 1990s (converted from highly-enriched uranium) to power nuclear reactors in the US. The US and Russia agreed to lower their warhead count.
Please see this factsheet from the Arms Control Association. https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/ukraine-nuclear-weapons-and-security-assurances-glance
