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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   33229 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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Why do you and others keep lying about the Budapest Memorandum? I can assume that you know perfectly well that it wasn't a binding security guarantee (which is precisely why it was called a 'memorandum'), and that it was signed primarily because it served US interests (to curb the then-scary prospect of nuclear proliferation), not because it was meant to benefit Ukraine.

Nobody suggested that the agreement was some act of charity, it was as you said part of a much broader attempt at non-proliferation by the US after the Cold War. But they wouldn’t have agreed to it without the firm assurance that Ukraine could enter the US orbit and not be invaded by a foreign power, otherwise why would they have given up the weapons? The US doesn’t have a policy of sanctioning other countries with nukes bar actual foes locked in existing frozen conflicts (North Korea) or which are engaged in a series of consequential proxy wars (Iran). Ukraine is relatively large and quite high IQ by most statistics despite being poor, they could have maintained some weapons.

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.

But they wouldn’t have agreed to it without the firm assurance that Ukraine could enter the US orbit and not be invaded by a foreign power, otherwise why would they have given up the weapons?

this is nonsense; they agreed to it because they were paid a bunch of money including ongoing "support" to decommission weapons and they didn't have control or possession of the weapons anyway

no one at the meeting thought the fluff language about respecting sovereignty meant a security guarantee and even if they did the respecting sovereignty would mean the US complains to the UNSC on which Russia sits and can veto

and the US has satisfied this many magnitudes more than was necessary even if one believes the memo means something those who negotiated and signed it didn't believe and even if one believes it's in any way binding

the deal was they either get paid money or they get invaded to recapture the weapons and take them off Ukrainian territory right then and there

I'd also add that surely similar agreements were signed with other non-Russian former Soviet republics with nuclear weapons on their soil, namely Byelorussia and Kazakhstan. Maybe this also happened in Budapest, I have no idea, but probably not. Anyway, these agreements are long forgotten for a good reason, but I'm fairly sure they also didn't contain any clause that could be interpreted as "permission to enter the US orbit in the future with an additional security guarantee to deter a Russian invasion".

the deal was they either get paid money or they get invaded to recapture the weapons and take them off Ukrainian territory right then and there

What’s your estimation of Russia’s ability and willingness to fund and mount an invasion of all of Ukraine in 1994?

A US invasion is likewise absurd, the US did barely more than vaguely attempt to track the mountains of missing post-Soviet nukes, some of which made their way to far more hostile states.

There was no enemy at the gates that would have forcibly taken the nukes from them in 1994, that’s just the reality of the situation.

You claimed:

But they wouldn’t have agreed to it without the firm assurance that Ukraine could enter the US orbit and not be invaded by a foreign power, otherwise why would they have given up the weapons?

"Firm assurance" to do what? Under which conditions? For how long? What does "enter the US orbit" even mean? If the big pile of money wasn't the motivating factor but "respecting sovereignty" language was, then the Ukrainians are too stupid to be trusted with nuclear weapons anyway because "respecting sovereignty" fluff language in a memorandum is a far cry from "firm assurance" let alone "security guarantee."

No, the US didn't give security guarantees or "firm assurance [Ukraine] wouldn't be invaded by a foreign power" in 1994, over 5 years before it added Poland to NATO. It just didn't happen. No American nor any Russian who signed the memo thought that's what happened.

And besides, the US has already satisfied even stronger language. The US alone has sent hundreds of billions and enough equipment to equip an army larger than any other in Europe except Russia. The US has already all but fired weapons at Russians and engaged in other acts of war and the only reason it wasn't labeled as such is because the Russians don't want them to be acts of war but there is a line at some point.

What’s your estimation of Russia’s ability and willingness to fund and mount an invasion of all of Ukraine in 1994?

It would be less "mount an invasion of all of Ukraine," and more "Moscow aligned soldiers who possessed the nuclear weapons would leave their bases and meet up with Russian soldiers coming across the border to secure the weapons and transport them to Russian territory," with American support, i.e., Americans were fine with this happening. Although if it became clear the Ukrainians attempted to seize and then traffic the weapons, I do not think it's absurd to think even a joint-operation would be on the table.

Ukraine couldn't use the nukes it "possessed" (but didn't), it would have to capture them and then disassemble them, obtain a trigger and then reassemble them before they would have had nuclear weapons. The status quo was Ukrainians didn't have useable nuclear weapons.

The question would be which Ukrainians were going to do this and with what army? Or which Ukrainians were going to stop the Moscow-aligned soldiers in in or before 1994 from doing it? The Ukrainian and Russian militaries didn't even disentangle for a decade after the memo.

It's easy to fall into this end-of-history re-remembering history. Admittedly, I'm not re-remembering anything, but I can read what contemporary people at the time were saying and the sort of implication that it was inevitable the US or others could do whatever and the Russians would do nothing is just nonsense. If you told someone in 1994 that the US was proxy fighting Russia not at the Rhein but at the Oskil River, they would have assumed the nukes already went flying and the world was destroyed.

Had the Ukrainian government ever knowingly facilitated or permitted the trafficking of nuclear weapons from their country to any rogue state and the US government learned about it, I think it's fair to assume that this was going to result in a US military intervention to topple the government, as in Panama in 1989, and seize the weapons, because this was precisely the scenario the Budapest Memorandum was designed to prevent.

Ukraine is relatively large and quite high IQ by most statistics despite being poor, they could have maintained some weapons.

NB: they'd have had to dismantle them and rebuild them, not just maintain them, in order to actually have usable nukes; the Soviet weapons were locked with PAL-equivalents and Kiev didn't have the codes. Dismantling and rebuilding nukes is easier than building them from scratch because you already have the weapons-grade actinides, but it's not trivial (except for gun-types, and AIUI the Soviet arsenal had few if any of those by 1991).

IIRC a good chunk of the infrastructure for nuclear production was located in Ukraine; they easily could have rebuilt their nukes if they made a conscious decision to do so.

But they wouldn’t have agreed to it without the firm assurance that Ukraine could enter the US orbit and not be invaded by a foreign power, otherwise why would they have given up the weapons?

Can you or anyone else link to the part of the memorandum that says anyone is supposed to do more than go complain to the UNSC if Ukraine comes under attack? The terms aren't secret. The war and the discussions surrounding it have been going on for years at this point. Much like Botond above I'm very tired of hearing Ukraine supporters lie about it constantly.

It's reached the point that I just mentally discard anything that makes reference to it as being in bad faith. Anyone who cares enough to participate in such a discussion should know better by now.

Nobody is alleging hidden terms. The reality is that Ukraine signed a terrible deal and no nation acting in its own interests should ever willingly give up nuclear weapons, ever (barring strange situations like the South African regime change). It’s more of a question of honor, and whether a country has any duty to another that they goaded into demilitarizing, then funded an anti-Russia revolution in. For most of the last 10 years, Zelensky was much more pro-Russia than the US was.

Nobody is alleging hidden terms. The reality is that Ukraine signed a terrible deal

So in fact they did agree to give up their nukes without firm assurance that they could enter US orbit, etc. Glad we're clear on that. That being the case, I hope we can see an end to support-maximalists waving the Budapest Memorandum around as if it says something it doesn't.

and no nation acting in its own interests should ever willingly give up nuclear weapons, ever (barring strange situations like the South African regime change).

Ukraine lacked the ability to launch those nukes and neither the US nor Russia were interested in allowing them to keep them. They gave them up because the alternative was to fight the world, and they received a meaningless deal in exchange because they had no real leverage.

It’s more of a question of honor, and whether a country has any duty to another that they goaded into demilitarizing, then funded an anti-Russia revolution in. For most of the last 10 years, Zelensky was much more pro-Russia than the US was.

America was never especially interested in Ukraine outright winning this war in the first place. Even the /r/worldnews drones complaining that Biden wouldn't give them the good stuff or let them shoot into Russia had it figured out. Ukraine was always a pawn meant to let the US buy Russian blood on the cheap, like a sale on milk. All we're doing now is arguing over how much money we really need to spend on milk regardless of how much of it we're getting for our dollar.

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