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Comment by fractallyte | Hacker News Reader

The UK is one of the signatories of the Budapest Memorandum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit...) which assured the integrity of Ukraine's border.

But that hasn't happened, right? And we don't hear very much about that in the news...

So the least the UK could do is to take in refugees :/

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The Budapest Memorandum did not say that. There is a lot of squishy talk around the Internet about what the agreement did and did not say, so I suggest simply reading the memorandum for yourself. It's short and pretty easily understood.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170312052208/http://www.cfr.or...

Edit: This piece from Brookings seems pretty useful and (as far as I know) accurate, as well. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/12/05/w...

I'm only going by the Content section of the Wikipedia article you reference (which may be wrong), but to me it doesn't say that the UK "assures the integrity of Ukraine's border", just that UK respects its independence and sovereignty (which it seems it does) and that it will consult with other parties if questions arise (which it seems to be doing). It doesn't sound as though the UK has broken its commitments there - can you point out what I've missed?

That's not to say it shouldn't take in refugees...

From Wikipedia:

In exchange for giving up their nuclear arms, "the memorandum included security assurances against threats or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan."

I think the question is what does "security assurances" mean. The term doesn't appear in the actual text of the memorandum (https://web.archive.org/web/20170312052208/http://www.cfr.or...) and so has been introduced by the Wikipedia author as a way of summarizing it.

The "Content" section of the Wikipedia article (which I referred to in my post) actually matches the memorandum pretty closely and, as I said before, it seems that the UK is complying. Can you point out which part of the memorandum the UK is not complying with?

Unfortunately, Wikipedia has a vague and misleading summary of the actual agreement. The signatories agreed not to use force against Ukraine themselves, but did not agree to defend it against aggression.

> The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirm their commitment to seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine, as a non-nuclear-weapon State party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used;

This is from the actual text

Yes. This provision was not very clearly written (at least not in the English language version) so its not obvious whether this provision applies to non-nuclear aggression against Ukraine. The scope of the qualifier "in which nuclear weapons are used" is ambiguous.

But in any case, the only required response is "to seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine," which certainly has happened.

The Budapest memorandum also assured no economic coercion, and it applied to Belarus, as well.

Still the USA applied sanctions against Belarus, therefore breaching the memorandum.

That’s also something you don’t hear very much in the news!

Probably because it's largely irrelevant to the matter at hand - Belarus is not the country getting invaded, and Ukraine is not the one that violated the agreement so there's zero justification for an invasion from either Russia or Belarus.

If anything, highlighting Belarus's involvement in the invasion serves to demonstrate that Russia's meddling in Belarus's elections was to install a puppet government and is a violation of their independence (and subsequently the memorandum).

I condemn any kind of invasion, so I agree with you on that part.

It amazes me that only some breaches of the Budapest memorandum are mentioned often, while others are somehow forgotten!

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