Ask yourself if you think Ukraine believed they had a deal when they gave up their nukes. We’re playing legal niceties with people’s lives. I for one think that we screwed them.
I’m aware of the gravity of the situation. I have “seen the elephant,” to use a term from a bygone era, and shed my blood on foreign soil in the process.
Ukrainian disarmament was—is—a tricky issue. After the wall came down, Chernobyl, etc., it was increasingly obvious that they were not going to be able to manage their stockpile of nukes and coupled with international pressure, were eager to be rid of them. There was just that matter of deterrence. Russia, the U.S., and UK gave assurances that any threat to Ukraine would be managed by the UN Security Council promptly. This is where it gets tricky.
1) Russia is a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and per the structure of that body, has veto power.
2) Clinton never got (or probably more accurately, “sought”) Senate approval for any defense treaty for Ukraine. I’ll skip scoring a cheap political joke about Clinton’s honesty but for all his faults he was a very astute president; he likely knew that coming out of the Cold War, there was little appetite for such a treaty. (I’ve also heard anecdotally from some of my contacts in a previous life who were in the U.S. Diplomatic Corps that there was some hangover at Foggy Bottom following the Falklands War. I haven’t researched it very thoroughly but I’ve heard there was some level of defense commitment to Argentina dating back to Pinochet or before that we turned a blind eye to in deference towards the British. I guess some of the careerists were trying to avoid a repeat of that diplomatic crisis.)
I don’t like coming off as unsympathetic but it is very obvious that this deal was a short term fix to appease the disarmament movement. Given the obvious position that Russia has on the security council and the fact that the American process for treaty ratification had been solidly in place for 200+ years at the time, whatever the Ukrainian government “thought” was naive, incorrect, etc etc. I can’t help but object to the notion that the U.S. has somehow “screwed” Ukraine, a country with whom we have no executed defense pact. Article 5 of the NATO treaty extends to NATO members; it does NOT extend to NATO members and all territories there adjacent.
If the President of the United States deems Ukraine to be a strategic ally on our NATO flank he needs to take his strategy and justification to the American people and make his case. Joe Biden did not have the political clout to unify the country around that argument six months after Kabul fell. To call that unfortunate for Ukraine would be a severe understatement. Three years later, Trump ran and won on a message of bringing the war to an end but the issue polled well behind domestic issues (economy, inflation, jobs, abortion, etc etc).
I truly hope Ukraine maintains their sovereignty.
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