Except that it's "assurance", not a 'guarantee'.
Sure I get the point, the US has fucked up on its assurances according to the agreement, but calling it a 'guarantee' is a lie.
Also from the article (and bolded for you):
Under the agreement, the signatories offered Ukraine "security assurances" in exchange for its adherence to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The memorandum bundled together a set of assurances that Ukraine had already held from the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) Final Act, the United Nations Charter and the Non-Proliferation Treaty[1] but the Ukrainian government found it valuable to have these assurances in a Ukraine-specific document.[25][26]
So Serryah has come from not knowing any thing about Ukraine a year ago to listening to one guy on a video 3 weeks ago to an expert on Ukraine today. Here is an article written on the subject I posted earlier in the thread
But explain to me the difference between assurance and a guarantee?
In 1994, the US succeeded in convincing Ukraine to give up its nukes but failed to secure its future
by
Jamie McIntyre, Senior Writer |
| January 13, 2022 11:00 PM
Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk, along with President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin, signed a
trilateral agreement, brokered by the U.S., to transfer all nuclear warheads to Russia for elimination.
In return for becoming a nonnuclear weapons state as a signatory of the Nonproliferation Treaty, Ukraine would get financial compensation, economic assistance, and essential
security assurances from the U.S., United Kingdom, and Russia recognizing Ukraine’s “independence and sovereignty” and specifying its existing borders could be changed “only peacefully by mutual agreement.”
Those assurances would prove worthless two decades later when Putin’s Russia illegally annexed Crimea and, through proxies, took control of the Donbas area of eastern Ukraine.
Here is a NPR article as well
February 21, 20225:16 PM ET
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.
Now, that agreement is front and center again.
Mariana Budjeryn of Harvard University spoke with
All Things Considered about the legacy of the Budapest Memorandum and its impact today.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Interview highlights
On whether Ukraine foresaw the impact of denuclearizing
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. This is a document signed at the highest level by the heads of state. So the implication was Ukraine would not be left to stand alone and face a threat should it come under one.
And I think perhaps there was even a certain sense of complacency on the Ukrainian part after signing this agreement to say, "Look, we have these guarantees that were signed," because incidentally, into Ukrainian and Russian, this was translated as a guarantee, not as an assurance.
So they had this faith that the West would stand by them, or certainly the United States, the signatories, and Great Britain, would stand up for Ukraine should it come under threat. Although, the precise way was not really proscribed in the memorandum.
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....
.More