Crowflies
1d ago
In America we had an election in the middle of our civil war
This is an irrelevant argument. It is as relevant to the current situation as a point than ancient Athenians had elections during Peloponnesian War. A better (since more recent) parallel is the suspension of elections by UK during WWII. It is definitely easier to conduct elections before the age of bombers and missiles hitting your polling stations.
However, what matters is that elections are suspended during the state of war according to the Ukrainian Constitution. Lifting the state of war would be criminally stupid when there is an ongoing war (the state of war allows some actions that are illegal during peace, like having a firing positions in private property by the military). Surely, there can be some legal trickery, like rolling suspension of state of war or some other legal tricks but this will not make it any more democratic that what it is now and there is still a matter of missiles raining from the sky. I would not like to see a headline "Presidential elections conducted in Ukraine. 25 dead, 150 injured, and 25,000 ballots destroyed in fires".
Crowflies
1d ago
When discussing Budapest Memorandum it is worth noting that it was signed in 1994 by Leonid Kravchuk who was a Soviet-Ukrainian leader. Ukraine at that time, while having some historical reasons to distrust Russia, was in perfectly good terms with them and in the heads of the ex-Soviet leaders an invasion by USA or UK, while also remote, may have seemed more likely than by Russia. Like all ex-Soviet countries, Ukraine was also completely bankrupt and money to maintain the nuclear weapons was going to be a significant drain to the newly created country. It is also worth noting that it was the country of freshly experienced Chernobyl-disaster and anything nuclear did not ring positively with the population.
While Ukraine had no ambitions at the time to become "western", by signing the agreement they definitely planed to enter the world stage as a partner of both the west and Russia and not as adversary.
With hindsight this agreement seems very naive and bad for Ukraine but the alternative of maintaining the nuclear status had many drawbacks, including international isolation with significant economic costs.
Crowflies
3d ago
Russia couldn't capture Ukraine (so far because the war is still ongoing) because Ukraine had the largest land military in Europe apart from Russia, had a vast air defense stockpile inherited from Soviet Union, and had a military that fought with some various intensity with Russia since 2014 and had experience. On top of that, Ukraine is large and has a large defense depth. Putin thought Ukraine will just not fight.
Nobody knows what Putin thinks but if he succeeds in Ukraine, he has a war machine, veterans (including criminals that would be better kept in the army), war economy that would crumble if demobilized. At this point, the risk of continuing the conquest may not be larger than the risk of demobilizing. Russia is no match to a unified NATO (even ex-US) but fractured and indecisive NATO is vulnerable.
Crowflies
3d ago
(Nature endorsing Biden).
Nature is owned by Springer Nature, a private for-profit publisher. Nature having a political stance does not differ from, say, The Economist.
Crowflies
3d ago
If it's so real, why can virtually no countries in Europe maintain their commitments to NATO spending?
The "virtually no countries" is completely not true. The European defense spending have been rising rapidly even before Trump came to office. Only a handful of NATO members do not spend 2% GDP and the number of allies exceeding the limit crossed 23 in 2004. There are now a few countries that spend more than US without having global ambitions and open ocean navies.
If this is the goal, then it's the worst way of achieving the goal. If there is a US-China confrontation in the future, it's getting more and more likely than EU will stay neutral because staying allied with US does not achieve anything. There is no military gain, no economic gain (you get slapped with tariffs at random) , there is no even moral gain (like the usual selling point of US being the leader of the free world).
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