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I think the most disturbing type of argument around Ukraine is the one that pretends to be doing it "for their own good". Like "Why don't you want peace, why don't you want peace? Why do you want your people to die?" to the victims of a dictator invading their home, bombing their cities, kidnapping their children and stealing their land. If they aren't settling for your offer it's probably because they don't think your offer is good enough to actually protect them. They're in desperation, if an offer was convincing they would take it. So why not?
They've been promised security before, they gave up their nukes for it. They sign a deal that Russia won't punch them in the face, Russia violates it twice and if they don't want to just sign another without a stronger third party guarantee, it's not because they don't want peace. It's because they know Russia can't be trusted.
They don't think American investments means much, before the war there was that joke rule of "no two countries with a McDonald's have ever been at war" which was essentially emblematic of this concept. That international business interests for peace were simply too strong for a country to overcome, and yet the war happened anyway.
If someone doesn't want to support Ukraine fine, there's lots of other bad stuff we ignore and don't help out with. But those people spreading this idea that "they must want to be invaded and die so not helping them is actually the best help", I just find that really sickening.
Why do you and others keep lying about the Budapest Memorandum? I can assume that you know perfectly well that it wasn't a binding security guarantee (which is precisely why it was called a 'memorandum'), and that it was signed primarily because it served US interests (to curb the then-scary prospect of nuclear proliferation), not because it was meant to benefit Ukraine.
Why are you insinuating that the Ukrainians are a blameless party in this conflict who can be trusted all the time?
Also, where is your enthusiasm? All I was hearing throughout the war from Atlanticist mainstream media was triumphalism promising total victory, because the Moskal are just a bunch of freezing, starving orcs who will use up their last functioning tank, cruise missile, artillery shell and pair of socks in two weeks. Where is the victory? Where is the glorious counteroffensive?
Nobody suggested that the agreement was some act of charity, it was as you said part of a much broader attempt at non-proliferation by the US after the Cold War. But they wouldn’t have agreed to it without the firm assurance that Ukraine could enter the US orbit and not be invaded by a foreign power, otherwise why would they have given up the weapons? The US doesn’t have a policy of sanctioning other countries with nukes bar actual foes locked in existing frozen conflicts (North Korea) or which are engaged in a series of consequential proxy wars (Iran). Ukraine is relatively large and quite high IQ by most statistics despite being poor, they could have maintained some weapons.
NB: they'd have had to dismantle them and rebuild them, not just maintain them, in order to actually have usable nukes; the Soviet weapons were locked with PAL-equivalents and Kiev didn't have the codes. Dismantling and rebuilding nukes is easier than building them from scratch because you already have the weapons-grade actinides, but it's not trivial (except for gun-types, and AIUI the Soviet arsenal had few if any of those by 1991).
IIRC a good chunk of the infrastructure for nuclear production was located in Ukraine; they easily could have rebuilt their nukes if they made a conscious decision to do so.
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