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There is already a thread on this, but I wanted to continue the discussion regarding the Lex/Zelenskyy interview. The other thread is mainly focused on Lex's language choice, and Lex's skills as an interviewer. I'm not very interested in this whole debate - it is pointless internet drama, and a modern form of celebrity worship. It's very disappointing that most people's takeaway "yay Lex" or "boo Lex" and not anything even slightly relevant to the actual war that is taking place.
My takeaway from the interview was that I think much less of Zelenskyy. This was his chance to explain the war from Ukraine's perspective, and the best he could come up with was a braindead "Putin = Hitler" take. People who rely on the "X = Hitler" argument are currently on a losing streak, and I am now more convinced than ever that Zelenskyy will continue that losing streak. I completely agree with Lex that if Zelenskyy believes that Putin is some mutant combination of Hitler and Stalin, yet somehow worse than both, compromise is not on the table. Zelenskyy dies or is forced into exile, or Putin dies or is forced into exile. In spite of biased media coverage in the West that only highlights Ukraine's successes and Russian setbacks, it's pretty clear at this point that if the status quo continues, Ukraine will lose a war of attrition first.
Zelenskyy could have tried to explain why Putin's narrative on the 2014 coup, or the ensuing War in Donbas, is incorrect. Instead, in 3 hours I don't remember him discussing Donbas even once. Maybe this is partially on Lex for not driving home the specifics. While Zelenskyy did not have time to address the core premise of the entire war, he did have time to engage in some psychotic rambling about how Putin would conquer all of Europe.
Maybe Zelenskyy is actually more reasonable in his private views, and he is simply running an outdated propaganda playbook that would have worked in the 1940's, or even the 2000's. But in today's age of high information availability, more subtlety is required. Even if you can convince the average person with a braindead argument like "Putin = Hitler", there will always be a subset of more intelligent people who demand a real argument. Since the more intelligent people tend to have out-sized influence, if you fail to offer them anything, they will not truly support you, or may even undermine you. If you are an intelligent person who doesn't really know much about the war, Zelenskyy offered nothing of substance. "Putin = Hitler" is not substance.
Maybe one possibility is that the two sides of the war are actually:
If these are the options, I'm afraid I have no choice but to take Russia's side. The coup and the War in Donbas, at minimum, happened and were upsetting to Russia, and it is not even remotely outside of the historical norm for such situations to eventually escalate into a full-blown war. On the other hand, 2 is a merely deflection of 1 - not a real argument, just a poor attempt at psychologizing why Putin's motivations aren't his stated motivations, which at least described by Putin are quite logical, but actually just that he is secretly Hitler for some reason. If there is an alternative version of 2, that actually addresses 1, I am certainly open to it.
This has been my experience with trying to talk to Ukraine supporters so far. It's basically how Zelenskyy talked to Lex as well. They do not seem to be able to form a coherent argument; instead they simply attempt to mock anybody who wants to hear someone address Russia's arguments directly from a pro-Ukraine perspective. Trying to shame people into supporting Ukraine, without actually addressing Russia's rationale for invading, is not going to work.
I believe that the reason Ukraine supporters refuse to address the history of the war is that the entire situation becomes more complex in a way that is unhelpful to their cause. Under certain ethical frames, even under Putin's assertions, Russia's invasion of Ukraine is still unquestionably wrong. However, to even make this observation, you admit that there is a question of ethical frame and values. Under some frames, Putin has some reasonable argument, assuming the facts are true. Some commentary has compared him to a "20th century statesman" in how he thinks about things. However, then you have a more difficult task of either refuting the facts or challenging the moral frame. Better then, to simply say "Putin = Hitler, anyone who doesn't agree with my ethical frame is a pyscho maniac murder," and avoid the conversation altogether. I understand this rationale, but I think it is the wrong approach for 2025, and it is certainly not any basis for negotiating an end to the war.
Trump wants to make peace, but it certainly appears that Zelenskyy is not open to it. He did talk about security guarantees - I think this is reasonable, depending on the specifics of the guarantees. Maybe even NATO membership. But he has to let go of the idea that he will get all of the land back. There is no universe in which the Putin regime stays and power and this happens, unless Ukraine achieves some military miracle. At an absolute minimum, the eastern Donbas is gone.
Where does this leave Trump? Obviously he is going to threaten Zelenskyy in various ways, such as threatening to completely ban the export of weapons to Ukraine, sanctions on Ukraine, sanctions on anyone who continues to support Ukraine until Zelenskyy is willing to come to the negotiating table, etc.. This is my prediction for how the war ends: Trump threatens Zelenskyy, Zelenskyy eventually gives in and negotiates, Russia gets some of the land, and Ukraine gets security guarantees backed by the US. The devil will be in the details, of course.
I am not, I am merely a casually observer who spends too much time online, and I am happy to hear your takes on XYZ. I'm not pro-Russia, I am just anti-terrible discourse, and the pro-Ukrainian discourse that I have observed has been horrendously poor. Disappointingly, Zelenskyy continued this. On the other hand, Putin's speeches were highly intellectual and several levels above any speech I have ever heard a Western leader give in terms of sophistication. I am also secure enough in myself that "well if you think that, it proves you're retarded" will not change my view. In the modern information environment, this argument is in fact less effective than ever.
Ukraine has security guarantees backed by the US right now. If the US is not willing to bleed for a healthy country with strong patriotic movement in 2022 whose security they have guaranteed in the 90s, chances that they will be willing for battered, divided, torn, lost half of the population and probably even bigger chunk of people with ability and fight in them, and in need of reconstruction are close to nil.
The historic norm so far is that when the US abandons artificially propped up ally - the other sides takes 100%.
Any deal that Putin will be willing to accept (while he is winning) will leave Ukraine completely demilitarized as a buffer between Russia and Poland. Which is non starter for Ukraine.
I assume you are referring to the Budapest Memorandum, by which Ukraine surrendered all of its nuclear weapons. That Memorandum famously did not use the term “security guarantee”, but rather the utterly toothless “security assurance”.
Ukraine never had any nuclear weapons. They were all Moscow ones. It's like saying that Turkey will surrender its nuclear arsenal if/when the US brings them back home from Incirlik
I think this makes some questionable assumptions about the "rightful" structure of the Soviet empire. As far as I know, those were Soviet weapons, paid for and made by Soviet citizens, some of whom were Ukrainian, and the other SSRs. That permanent control would belong to the (former!) capital unreasonably privileges it over the other fragmenting client states.
I don't think it would be reasonable, for example, for the British to have demanded back all their military assets from newly-independent nations as their empire fragmented. "But those ships and guns belong to London!" seems an odd rallying cry for things in many cases the colonies themselves funded.
But in realpolitik terms, I suppose it did make sense at the time to limit the number of resulting nuclear states for proliferation reasons.
They have permissive action links though, nukes are unlike other weapons in that they don't 'just work'. Only decisionmakers in Moscow could fire them (otherwise any rogue commander could go and write Dr Strangelove fanfiction in the history books).
I think that's a valid concern in the short term, but I wouldn't expect access control features like permissive action links to prevent a nuclear-capable nation (Ukraine has nuclear plants and engineers) from repurposing weapons it its possession for an extended duration. I assume it's more like a password on a locked computer, but maybe it's more intrinsic than that (I doubt the details are public enough to know).
These things are explicitly designed to prevent anyone accessing them without authorization, I think they're quite complex. In theory of course you can jailbreak them but the Ukrainians had trouble doing so. Do we really want a nuclear Ukraine, a nuclear Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan? Hey, the Baltics were part of the Union, a dozen warheads each? Armenia and Azerbaijan immediately went to war, did they deserve a few H-bombs to liven up the South Caucasus?
Some would probably fall into the hands of Chechen or other Islamist terrorists in the confusion of the 1990s. It's amazing that none did in real life. Moscow took Soviet debt and the permanent UN seat, they might as well have the nukes too and keep the command and control system that was set up working.
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The better analogy would be, suppose the US broke up and, say, Texas and California became independent states (in the international relations sense), with California internationally recognized as the “successor state” of the US.
Would formerly-US nuclear weapons, located in Texas for the purpose of deterring an invasion through Texas’s flat and quickly-traversible terrain, manufactured by personnel from all over the former-US (including California), but maintained and operated primarily by Texans, become rightfully Californian overnight? What about all other formerly-US military hardware/personnel in the former-US?
Anyway, back in the real world, the point remains that no signatory to the Budapest Memorandum ever provided Ukraine with any kind of “security guarantee”. Indeed, the Americans were well aware of the military obligations such wording would entail, and thus specifically insisted on the weaker “security assurance”.
In this hypothetical scenario, Texas would control the vast majority of the US nuclear arsenal due to the Pantex plant.
'Which states would have nuclear weapons if the US hypothetically balkanized' is an answered question.
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The California and Texas Republics had better not cross the Kingdom of North Dakota. It has the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal.
Yes, in this scenario it’s behind only Russia and Texas, while California has an extremely small arsenal.
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The US NATO nuclear umbrella is maintained by US troops stationed in those countries.
In contrast both the warheads and thier fuzing elements were in the custody of the UAF making them Moscow's in name only.
As per Wikipedia, Russia maintained control over the weapons in Ukraine. The situation was probably analogous, from what I can tell without having gotten into the weeds.
The hard-to-replace components (the fissile material and the polonium initiators) were physically in Ukraine and under Ukrainian control. The Russians controlled the codes needed to arm the nukes, and if the PALs worked as advertised this means that the Ukrainians couldn't arm or detonate the nukes.
Disassembling the nukes for components and building a Ukrainian bomb was probably beyond the capabilities of 1990's Ukraine, but would be well within the capabilities of a functioning middle-income country. The N-th country experiment suggested that building a working nuke with access to the required materials and 1960's technology was a "two smart guys in a garage" level project.
They definitely were in Ukraine, but I think, from my limited poking around, that it might be an overstatement to say they were under Ukrainian control. From what I understand, parts of the Russian and Ukrainian military didn't disaggregate until at least 1997 (when the Black Sea Fleet was split), and Ukraine agreed in 1991 that the nuclear weapons would be controlled from Moscow under the auspices of the CIS. Furthermore, the troops that physically controlled the Ukrainian nuclear weapons were...not necessarily loyal to Ukraine:
According to the DTRA report, Mikhytuk and most of his men refused to take an oath of loyalty to Ukraine in 1992.
The above is from a 2014 Defense Threat Reduction Agency report ("With Courage and Persistence") about US disarmament programs. It's also something I found by reading the Wikipedia page on the Budapest Memorandum – so this isn't something I know a lot about, and I'm certainly open to counter-points on the matter. This is all somewhat new to me – I had kinda thought the weapons were stranded in Ukraine with Russia holding onto the PAL codes until I noticed that Wikipedia insisted the weapons were never under Ukrainian operational control.
Agree on the ease of building atomic weapons.
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