RE: The Blame Game has started 😂3 Jul 2023 20:59
I wonder why Ukraine wishes to join NATO?
"Three decades ago, the newly independent country of Ukraine was briefly the third-largest nuclear power in the world. Thousands of nuclear arms had been left on Ukrainian soil by Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But in the years that followed, Ukraine made the decision to completely denuclearize. In exchange, the U.S., the U.K. and Russia would guarantee Ukraine's security in a 1994 agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum.
It is hard to estimate whether Ukrainians would foresee the impact. It is clear that Ukrainians knew they weren't getting the exactly legally binding, really robust security guarantees they sought. But they were told at the time that the United States and Western powers — so certainly at least the United States and Great Britain — take their political commitments really seriously.
On whether Russia has respected the memorandum….Russia just glibly violated it. And there's a mechanism of consultations that is provided for in the memorandum should any issues arise, and it was mobilized for the first time on March 4, 2014. So there was a meeting of the signatories of the memorandum that was called by Ukraine and it did take place in Paris. And the foreign minister of the Russian Federation, Sergey Lavrov, who was in Paris at the time, simply did not show up. So he wouldn't even come to the meeting in connection with the memorandum.
Russia argues that it signed it with a different government, not with this "illegitimate" one. But that, of course, does not stand to any international legal kind of criteria. You don't sign agreements with the government, you sign it with the country".
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