Thread by @OlegKostour

𝟭/𝟭𝟬

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗮 𝗨𝗸𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗮𝗻 𝗡𝘂𝗰𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿 𝗗𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁 (𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟰)

I've decided to rock the boat a bit and put forward some reasoning for why I think Ukraine should begin its nuclear program if Trump is elected on Nov 5, 2024, and why it is the most rational thing for a Ukrainian leader to do if they wanted to save Ukrainian lives this coming century.

Note that the urgency would be reduced if Harris wins the election, proves herself to have a more assertive policy towards Russia than Biden has, and is able to bring Ukraine into NATO through diplomacy (staving off the third Russian-Ukrainian war).

𝟮/𝟭𝟬

𝗧𝗿𝘂𝗺𝗽, 𝗡𝗔𝗧𝗢 𝗩𝗲𝘁𝗼𝗲𝘀 & 𝗪𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗱𝗿𝗮𝘄𝗮𝗹 𝗼𝗳 𝗦𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁

Trump will almost certainly block NATO entry for Ukraine and will pull most military aid (perhaps with the exception of loans that force Ukraine to buy American arms at unaffordable prices for Ukraine and lead to them losing the war by having to spend more than Russia, for less materiel).

NATO entry requires unanimous approval. Even if Biden was in support, with many countries such as Hungary opposed, it would be very difficult to get all these countries into alignment. US pressure is necessary to make that happen, as it would be the American nuclear umbrella protecting Ukraine and its regional allies.

We have already seen surveys of what European countries would do when America pulls back. And many of them would pull back as well. If you combine the loss of American arms support for Ukraine alongside a potential cascading partial decline of European support, we could see a 50% - 60% decline in support for Ukraine from 2025 onwards.

This makes continuing a conventional conflict very difficult for Ukraine, the end-game of which may be a pyrrhic victory for Russia.

This puts Ukraine into a position where (1) NATO entry is off the table, and (2) maintaining status quo has a time limit (depending on how long their stockpiles take to get depleted with less equipment coming into Ukraine than it would be expending).

𝟯/𝟭𝟬

𝗕𝗥𝗜𝗖𝗦 𝟮𝟬𝟰𝟬 & 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗵𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗚𝟳 𝗦𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗚𝗹𝗼𝗯𝗮𝗹 𝗚𝗗𝗣

Thus far, the hesitance of countries like China in supporting Russia more directly (say through a Chinese lend-lease) was due to the fear that the US could sanction them and create havoc in their economies. This will likely continue to be a concern in the future, but the BRICS simultaneously continues to grow as a percentage of global GDP, eroding the influence of sanctions by the West.

And the world's biggest countries like India and China are showing they are willing to co-operate with each other, and with Russia, while BRICS is aligning many other parts of Eurasia (with Iran joining & Turkey toying with the idea of becoming a member).

China may have mostly limited itself to helping Russia *economically* in 2024, but in 2034 or 2044, they may opt for more direct military support on par with what NATO has offered Ukraine. And if at some point, Russia eventually returns to the battlefield with more allied soldiers than just 10,000 North Koreans, we may be facing a very different war on the continent in a decade or two. One with the latest technological inputs of a strengthened China.

This underscores the need for Ukraine to think beyond its immediate threats and anticipate how the global order might tilt further against them in the future.

𝟰/𝟭𝟬

‘𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗨𝗸𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗲’ 𝗼𝗳 𝟵𝟬’𝘀

In 1991, when many of the Soviet successor states began to declare independence, there were 4 resultant nuclear republics (including Russia).

The US considered many pressure tactics to force 3 of them to centralize their nuclear weaponry in Russia so that the U.S. didn't have to restructure its entire Cold War nuclear posture that had been designed to minimize the risk of nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia through a careful set of processes implemented after some near missteps (Cuban missile crisis).

Given how quickly the Soviet Union collapsed they biased extremely conservative to ensure command and control of the nuclear weapons remained under Moscow’s centralized control, to the expense of the 3 other republics (major risks to their future sovereignty and independence).

To get Ukraine to capitulate, this included:

• Withholding food aid (to offset shortages artificially created by the collapse of a communist system)

• Market access to the West (as they converted from a communist to capitalist economy)

• Loans needed in an acute moment of crisis

Ukraine and Belarus were also just 5 years out from having to clean up the Chernobyl disaster, which occurred 150 km upriver from Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. This problem was not permanently solved by the Chernobyl sarcophagus and Ukraine required more international assistance to deal with this long term challenge and protect its civilian population.

It was also a period where American leadership didn't believe that Ukrainians had the history of statesmanship, nor well-formed strategies of command and control to deal with managing a nuclear arsenal responsibly. Many have disagreed with this perspective but this seems to have been the Zeitgeist of the time based on the American speeches I have seen.

The lens of viewing Ukraine was tinted through Moscow’s colours, and American presidents like George H.W. Bush stopped by Moscow before coming to Kyiv, letting Russian leadership frame their entire perspective.

The Americans were all too eager to eliminate Ukraine’s deterrent, while it turned out Ukraine was too weak to successfully resist.

Attached are photos of a smiling Senator Nunn (D) and Senator Lugar (R) during this period and shortly after, as they partnered closely with Russia to disarm Ukraine.

𝟱/𝟭𝟬

𝗨𝗸𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟰

But Ukraine today is not the same as Ukraine in 1991.

First, a byproduct of the loss of the territories of Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea in 2014 began a shift in the voting demographics of Ukraine's elections, as the many of the occupied, partially pro-RU regions of the country no longer participated. And those that left their occupied homes to continue living in Ukraine (Kyiv, etc), had an inherent selection bias of being pro-UA.

The impact of this and the hybrid invasion by Russia in 2014 was that the country looked significantly more unified going into the 2014 election.

The era of the past where Ukrainian politics flip-flopped between a pro-Western president (Yuschenko, 2004) and pro-Russian president (Yanukovych, 2010) were over. No pro-RU president could ever again get a majority of the Ukrainian vote after 2014.

The shock of the 2022 invasion happening during a fairly popular president’s leadership (Zelensky), unified most remaining segments of Ukrainian society.

This means that Ukraine is now a much more stable democracy that can be trusted to remain staunchly pro-Western if the West doesn’t screw this up.

And that stability makes it much more likely that the West will not see Ukraine as a strategic threat to other NATO countries if it remilitarizes (at least compared to how they saw Ukraine coming out of the Soviet Union) and this will dampen Western opposition to a Ukrainian nuclear deterrent.

The era of a 2-pole election result (West/North vs. East/South) are over as you can see from the maps of the first round election in 2004 / 2010 vs. 2019 (and into the future).

𝟲/𝟭𝟬

𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗸 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝗪𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻 𝗢𝗽𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻

One of the primary deltas between the various options of how Ukraine could end this war will be how Ukraine will relate to the West in the future.

If Ukraine ends the war outside of NATO and non-nuclear, it will remain in a highly dependent position which will cause it to be vulnerable to future abuse. Also, the next war will most *certainly* be fought on Ukrainian soil again.

If Ukraine ends this war inside NATO, it will have the confidence of a defence alliance and this is a great option.

However, if Ukraine ends this war as a nuclear state (irrespective of whether it is in NATO) the balance of power in the relationship with the West will substantially shift in Ukraine's favour.

Its association with the West will be on a more voluntary basis, and if the West desires Ukraine's assistance in future conflicts, it would have to provide mutually beneficial incentives. Thus far, the West has done this, and it is hard to criticize their support. But Western politics are fickle and are best to ground in logical arguments in the future.

This will result in Ukraine being treated much better by neighbouring allied countries - no more one-sided sacrifices of Ukrainian men and women to fight a war with Russia so that the West doesn’t have to sacrifice their own lives.

The Russian challenge will not go away for the West with a nuclear Ukraine. Russia will just redistribute the pressure it applies to other regions.

When Russia does its ROI calculus on where to expend its military efforts, they will certainly not choose to attack a nuclear armed Ukraine as their best option. Russia may even go so far as to see the idea of attacking non-nuclear parts of NATO as lower risk than attacking a nuclear Ukraine. With a nuclear Ukraine that sits outside of NATO, the defence of NATO states defaults to the other NATO member states that have a defence alliance with them. Will they live up to expectations on their own?

If America can no longer pursue a Europe-First strategy by 2035+, because it has an absolute imperative to shift focus to an Asia-First strategy in order to contain China (after procrastinating this action for decades), this will mean that the defence of Europe will fall exclusively on the European NATO states that have shown that they are quicker to appease Russia by sacrificing buffer territories than to challenge Russia directly. Which parts of NATO will they sacrifice when they no longer have Ukraine as an option?

Does one really see the democracies of modern Germany or France able to sustain a large scale de-occupation counter-offensive into the Baltics after a Russian Blitzkrieg into Latvia? And what if by 2035, with a Chinese lend-lease in hand, Russia finds itself to be a peer competitor to many of the European powers that might participate in such a defensive war?

The West actually needs Ukraine, with its experienced million-man army, warfare technology knowhow, and military manufacturing base on their side. Because no one else is willing to actually fight!

It can't be more clear, 3 years into this war, how little willingness there is to enter the conflict as a belligerent. And how the 2020's West differs from the Cold War 1950's West.

This functionally means that Europe, and America cannot afford to sanction Ukraine and keep Ukraine outside of their alliance if Ukraine eliminated the option of keeping itself as their buffer state sponge to soak up Russian military might.

Up until now, we have exclusively been thinking about how Ukraine is going to gain leverage in its eventual negotiation with Russia.

But we need to equally be thinking about how Ukraine will gain leverage with the West. And having the option to opt-out of fighting the next war, is the exact leverage Ukraine needs to be able to pressure NATO into letting it join the alliance and be treated as an equal.

𝟳/𝟭𝟬

𝗪𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗗𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸?

Ukraine may have lost its nuclear *weapons* in 1991-1994, but it didn’t lose the entirety of its nuclear deterrent.

It did, in fact, retain an a nuclear HEU deterrent.

Ukraine’s retention of weapons-grade Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) from 1991 - 2012 seemed to have successfully kept Russia from resorting to using hard power (I.e. the annexations of 2014 and 2022).

One can only conclude that the fear that Ukraine could immediately convert its HEU stockpile into multiple nuclear weapons (3+, according to the press) if it was attacked was sufficient enough to restrain Russia to using soft-power techniques to influence Ukraine (assassinations, election fraud, corruption, oil & gas supply pressure, predatory loans) over hard-power techniques (direct military intervention).

Proof of this fact is seen in that there was no invasion when the first “Maidan” happened in 2004 (A.K.A. the "Orange Revolution").

In both 2004 and 2014, Russian puppet Viktor Yanukovych was in some way removed from power by a popular revolution in Kyiv.

In 2004, the protest resulted in an investigation into election fraud + a Supreme Court declaration that the initial vote was invalid with a ballot recount that stripped Yanukovych of his fraudulent electoral victory, taking the upcoming presidency away from him.

In 2014, Ukrainians outright rejected *his* rejection of the EU association agreement and attempts to join the Eurasian Economic Union (Dugin’s USSR Redux), ousting him from the presidency directly, as he fled to Moscow.

While these events had many parallels, what is particularly notable is not what happened in Ukraine, but how Russia reacted differently in two very similar circumstances. Why? Yushchenko was trying to secure a path to NATO with a membership action plan in 2006. Why not attack then? Wasn’t that the exact justification given for 2022 or 2014? What was the obstacle in 2006?

I posit that it was in fact the potential threat of a nuclear Ukraine that helped keep Russia at bay from 1991-2012.

As soon as Ukraine’s capability to quickly develop nuclear weapons was taken away with Obama's removal of HEU from Ukraine to Russia in 2012, Russia annexed Crimea at its next available opportunity (after trying its failed lower-risk strategy of using a corrupted Yanukovych to bring Ukraine under its influence).

If Ukraine regains its nuclear capacity, I believe that all Russian invasions of the territory of Ukraine will end, permanently, as capturing the ruins of half of Zaporizhia is not worth trading for Moscow.

Russia’s population density is extremely asymmetrical (picture attached), and Ukraine only needs short range weaponry to reach Moscow (500 km) or St. Petersburg (1000 km). This makes it easy to design a conservative nuclear deterrence strategy that does not require ICBMs which would be able to reach Western nuclear capitals (London, Paris) or the U.S. This will further alleviate Western concerns, and Ukraine can negotiate some new range safeguards / guarantees with the West. A drone delivery system of some kind is probably likely.

𝟵/𝟭𝟬

𝗧𝗵𝗲 “𝗕𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗱𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗱𝘀” 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝟭𝟵𝟯𝟬’𝘀, 𝟭𝟵𝟰𝟬’𝘀 & 𝟮𝟬𝟰𝟬’𝘀

One of the learnings one must take from @TimothyDSnyder’s Bloodlands is that countries caught geographically between two major warring parties, suffer.

Tens of millions of people died in Central Europe either through genocidal occupations, Gulag concentration camp deportations, or as soldiers criss-crossed back and forth through Ukrainian, Baltic, Belarusian and Polish cities, destroying everything in their path like the result in Bakhmut today.

It is Ukraine’s critical mandate that the next major war fought in Europe this coming century between Russia and the West is NOT FOUGHT ON UKRAINE. The second that Ukraine becomes a nuclear power, all future fighting will shift elsewhere to what is perceived as "safer territory" to engage in by Russia.

It may even be the case that by 2040, if the US goes down a path of domestic turmoil or is forced to pull its support from its European NATO commitments in order to contain China in Asia, the diminished power of NATO in Europe may make NATO territory itself be seen as less dangerous for Russia to engage in than a nuclear Ukraine.

The expectation that NATO will be a sufficiently strong alliance to deter Russia for the next 50-100 years is not set in stone. For all we know, many countries will opt out of the NATO alliance the minute it is challenged if they are not guaranteed to win the conflict (I.e., if there is not direct American military involvement).

In the same way that funding for Ukraine from many EU states may decline with the withdrawal of U.S. support by Trump, many NATO countries may choose to opt out of fighting Russia in the next war. And it will be Russia’s strategy to continue to divide NATO to the maximum extent, so this divisive pressure is not likely to subside any time soon.

It could also be possible, depending on how geopolitics plays out over the next few decades, that if Ukraine joins NATO as a non-nuclear state, it may STILL find that the next war is fought on Ukrainian soil.

𝟵/𝟭𝟬

𝗟𝗲𝗴𝗮𝗹 & 𝗠𝗼𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗝𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗮𝗻 𝗡𝗣𝗧 𝗪𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗱𝗿𝗮𝘄𝗮𝗹

I'll just end by saying that the strength of the case of Ukraine's withdrawal from the NPT (and the risks of potential down-funnel sanctions) substantially depends on the timing of the withdrawal and the events surrounding it. There has never been a historically stronger case for an NPT withdrawal, than that of Ukraine's today.

• The continued existence of the country can be legally argued to be at risk (serious existential threat)

• The aggressor has shown a willingness to commit genocide as evidenced by the ICC charges and continues to commit war crimes and execute POWs

• Trump ending US military aid may cause a cataclysmic decline in Ukraine's conventional capabilities

• Allies are refusing to let Ukraine into NATO or declare war on Russia (as they are unwilling to create a defence alliance with Ukraine) are defacto abandoning it to save themselves

All that leads to a clear conclusion that Article X of the NPT can be fairly invoked. And it can be done without any advance warning to the Russians that Ukraine has chosen this path, because Ukraine is currently at war. This gives Ukraine the element of surprise.

So if they can keep such a program sufficiently secret, they can announce the exit from the NPT at the same time that they announce they are now nuclear capable.

If Ukraine risks waiting until after the war is frozen, the case becomes much weaker. If Russia subsequently plays coy and temporarily pretends they are no longer an imminent threat to Ukraine, like they did from 2015-2021, it will substantially complicate Ukraine's approach and may lead to increased tension with Western politicians.

𝟭𝟬/𝟭𝟬

𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗹𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻

Ukraine probably has more Uranium under its feet than the rest of Europe combined. It does not need to take illicit actions to import the raw material to do this, like Taiwan did (importing 100 tons of Uranium from South Africa in 1973-1974). These reserves make it an inevitable player on the global nuclear landscape.

As the world potentially descends into Great Power politics in the coming 20 years, many allied democracies around the world will desire access to Uranium that countries like the USA would resist giving them (South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan come to mind).

Particularly if China was ever to convert to an offensive Russian-like posture against its neighbors. This makes these countries very likely to work with Ukraine, even if incognito.

The US would not want Ukraine to start going down this path, so they will be pressured to eventually accept Ukraine's seat at the table if they fail to stop Ukraine from going nuclear. The argument can easily be made that being a nuclear power is no obstacle to open trade with the U.S., as Britain, France and Israel have no such problems. And in my opinion, the West cannot risk sanctioning Ukraine as it will lose the global war for hearts and minds.

Ukraine feeds 400 million people in the world. Any attempt to sanction Ukraine will lead to global famine and protests in places that the West does not want to lose influence in. And if Ukraine goes nuclear and Western sanctions blockade its ability to export or trade its goods, the West will take the blame for the fallout. Not Ukraine. Especially if Ukraine continues to actively be a bastion of morality in the world as it is today (a David to a nuclear Goliath).

So it's really a checkmate. Ukraine has a winning play in front of them if Ukrainian leadership has the courage to make the move.

In my opinion, given what we've seen and how dynamic and innovative Ukrainian leadership has been, they do.