Some home truths about the much misunderstood #BudapestMemoramdum.
I am tired of people who do not understand the Budapest Memorandum citing it as a reason for why we just support Ukraine. There are good arguments for supporting Ukraine, but this isn't one of them. First...[1/n]
...the US and UK broke the Budapest Memorandum long before 2014. The Memorandum was signed on on 5 December 1994, to provide security assurances by its signatories relating to the accession of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of...[2/n]
...Nuclear Weapons. That is to say, not just Ukraine, but also Belarus and Kazakhstan. Article 3 says that signatories should "Refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by the signatory of the rights inherent in its...[3/n]
...sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind."
Yet Britain, the US and the EU have consistently for over 20 years imposed sanctions on Belarus. When in 2013 Minsk complained that this broke the terms of the Memorandum, the US State Department swatted the...[4/n]
...objections aside. First, it reminded Minsk that "the Memorandum is not legally binding." Second, it said that the economic sanctions were in fact for human rights violations. In other words, the US decided it could carve out exceptions unilaterally, and anyway, it
...[5/n]
...was not a binding treaty.
Secondly, Ukraine never had nuclear weapons it could use. Russia was the successor state to the Soviet Union, and as such the nuclear codes and nuclear football were handed by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to Russian President Boris...[6/n]
...Yeltsin on 25 December 1991, the day the USSR was dissolved and Russia became a sovereign state. Ukraine never had the codes, it never had control over the weapons, so it gave up nothing. What it did do was sign the Nuclear Weapons Non-Proliferation Treaty at the...[7/n]
...behest of the United States of America, thereby promising not to develop its own. But that's hardly unusual. Nuclear non-proliferation has been, apart from Israel, a long standing US policy priority, and Washington has acted with extreme prejudice against any nation...[8/n]
...that tries.
Ultimately, the citing the Budapest Memorandum as a reason we 'must' support Ukraine is simply mistaken and, as far as I can see, borne of ignorance, as Peter Hitchens and @georgegalloway have said many times. Yet it is repeated over and over as if it's fact.ENDS
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