We Know That Ukraine Knows: U.S. Security Guarantees Are Worthless These Days

“Oh, thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war’s desolation!”

The U.S. media really sucks at its job.

So what else is new.

Because every time Trump, damn his name or any of his underlings mentions offering security guarantees to Ukraine as part of any proposed “peace deal” at least some of them should be pointing out that we’re currently reneging on the last security guarantee we gave them.

So is Russia, obviously, but we’re supposed to be the good guys.

See, in 1991 Ukraine came into possession of the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world when the Soviet Union collapsed. Many of the actual control systems were in Russia, but the actual weapons were in Ukraine.

So, not immediately useful to either Russia or Ukraine but definitely more likely to be useful to Ukraine eventually.

But in 1994 Ukraine gave them up.

In exchange for various guarantees from Russia, the U.S. and the U.K, including a guarantee of territorial integrity and support in the event that integrity was threatened, Ukraine sent their entire nuclear arsenal to Russia.

To be “dismantled”.

Uh huh.

I wonder how that went.

Fine, I’m sure.

Anyway, there’s a decent description of this history on Wikipedia. You can see from the text there that the security guarantee from the U.S. was pretty vague and Ukraine almost certainly knew at the time that it wouldn’t be much use.

But it was there, and it was still there when Putin decided to break Russia’s “obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine”.

So we’re already obligated to assist and support Ukraine.

And the media (as well as the supposed opposition parties) in at least the U.S. and U.K. should be bringing this existing commitment up every time anyone tries to offer a security guarantee to Ukraine.

We’ve done that already, and just look how that’s working out.

They know better than to trust the U.S. again.