I bet Ukraine is regretting their decision right now.
I live in Kazakhstan which also gave up its USSR nuclear legacy and it was the only sane way to go.
What Ukraine should have done back then is get better guarantees for this deal. Not some sketchy "Memorandums" which bind to nothing.
They had a shitload of nukes. That gives you a lot of choices. They just sadly chose wrong thinking that the world is better of with them not having them. Should have kept a few.
So if they had them Russia would not have attacked.
I'm not advocating large scale nuclear war but a doctrine like france has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_de_dissuasion
Not sure how world should treat it post this war (barring it won't turn into WW 3), but never, ever as equal, always expect treachery. Enough lessons at this point.
So this will be mutual.
China and some other countries, on the other hand, are considered trustworthy partners who play by rules.
The ability to launch them was only something Moscow could do (they might have been able to reverse engineer control and remove safeguards and the might not). They needed to have tritium replaced every 12 years and IIRC many of the nuclear forced remained loyal to Russia.
That's their bargaining position at the time and that's before we add the international pressure to get rid of them.
The space program had a lot of Ukrainians too.
It has a lot of nuclear physicists and rocket scientists. My uncle was a Ukrainian ICBM scientist!
IMO, a quintessential American foreign policy error is to measure the worth of others based only on purchasing power of imports; and then, even when they go past that 0th level of the expanding brain meme onto the value of human capital, the only human capital they value is traditional Western human capital.
Anyway, the engagement on this platform over foreign policy issues is great. I’m literally a product of foreign policy. Nearly everyone I know is affected by foreign policy. It’s valuable to have an opinion about this stuff.
And no way to finance them.
Not even North Korea does that kind of shit. Reconciling was a pipe dream.
But this shoot down had so much going on, it was for all intents and purposes, intentional. The level of aggression shown by that captain, the violations of territorial waters ans deviations from standard practice. He attacked everything that moved and the climate in which his behaviour was tolerated is also a factor. He wanted to shoot a plane down. His colleagues had given him a nickname and his superiors had concerns about the recklessness.
The final settlements reflects the indefensible behaviour.
How is NATO working out at the moment with war at its doorstep and a series of threats, provocations and violations? I don’t see any sign that NATO is winning.
I am not sure what NATO should be winning. We are not currently, formally at war, so to me that seems like winning enough. If NATO is not winning, then who is?
They did have a choice. A choice between short-term prosperity and guaranteed long-term security. They chose prosperity because Russia didn't feel like a threat back in the early 1990s. Russia under Gorbachev and Yeltsin felt like the beginning of a democratic era for that country. The mood was extremely optimistic and hopeful.
The error Ukrainians made was tragic. They should have learned that historical patterns repeat. You do not want to be a country between Germany and Russia without a mutual defense treaty with a superpower (which I recognize that you noted in your post), or nukes.
> they probably would be sanctioned like Iran pretty wild assumption
Ukraine gave up nukes because we thought it was the right thing to do. Obviously, no other country will do that in the future.
Technically it could be done, I guess. But probably Ukrainians did not want to live in isolation. I mean, the whole USSR collapse was about indulging in the "western values". Jeans, bubblegum, Arnold Schwarzenegger, all cool stuff.
> Obviously, no other country will do that in the future.
We will see when US will collapse and states will separate. I don't think that all of them would keep nuclear weapons.
Why? What do you think would be different now?
Do you think Ukraine would have used them against Russia in response to a ground invasion that has used only conventional weapons thus far?
And chemical. And has violated most other rules of warfare (as does every other war). Rape, genocide and murder of civilians is a bit too common in this conflict.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/06/russia-accused...
Russia having nukes is also a big reason NATO is tiptoeing around to avoid offending Putin too severely.