How to avoid a new Russian assault? While negotiations accelerate in the United States, Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, states that “security guarantees” are granted to Kyiv if a peace agreement was signed.
If the Ukrainians want at all costs to avoid repeating the Russian invasion of 2022, they were also staggered by the firm of previous texts that were not enough to maintain their invited borders. The Budapest memorandum in 1994 was one of them.
Ukraine deprived nuclear deterrence
Signed by the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia in the Hungarian capital, this document was aimed at denuclearizing Ukraine while protected its sovereignty. In the fall of the USSR, thousands of Soviet eyes were parked in Ukrainian territory, doing de facto of the country the third global nuclear energy.
With this memorandum, Kyiv agreed to return his arms to Russia and integrate the treaty on the non -proliferation of nuclear weapons (TNP) as a state not endowed with El Weapon. The identical treaties were signed the same year with two other ex-Soviet republics, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
“From the moment Ukraine renounced the nuclear weapons that were parked in their territory and that returned them to Russia, it was deprived of a deterrent instrument. Then, the great powers of the time, including Russia, promised not to intervene and preserve the security of Ukraine,” explains General JJ Je Jeme Pellistrandi, consulting defense for BFMTV.
The first article in the Memorandum indicates that “the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States of America reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the principles established in the final law of the conference on safety and cooperation in Europe, to respect its independence and its sovereignty and its existing edges.”
An ineffective text
Unfortunately, this text was not enough to avoid the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, which has denied its commitments by violating Ukrainian territorial integrity. Volodymyr Zelensky referred to March 4, 2022, the ninth day of the Russian invasion, in a speech that indicates the immesters of Westerners.
“Everything that the alliance has managed to do so far is to transport fifty tons of diesel fuel for Ukraine through its supply system. Probably so that we can burn the Budapest memorandum,” said the Ukrainian president in his speech.
For the 30th anniversary of the Memorandum signing, the Ukrainian President denounced a “document did not work for a single day.” “And thanks to this, everyone in the world will now know that a simple firm of any insurance or promises or promises are not enough to guarantee security,” he added.
If the Budapest memorandum did not stop the Russian tanks, it is because the signatories did not act specifically to intervene in case of violation of the commitments assumed. He simply provided consultations between the parties and an appeal before the United Nations Security Council.
This dead angle is explained in particular by the context in which the text was written. “We had a Russia led by Boris Yeltsin, which is very weakened and explodes from everywhere. The western ones considered that we had won the cold war and that it was an established case,” contextualizes General Pellistrandi. As for Ukraine, “he was dominated by the oligarchs and did not aroused a strong interest of the West.”
American non -intervention policy
“The legal argument was the pretext, in my opinion quite fallacious, used by the Americans and the British so as not to intervene in 2014” during the annexation of Crimea, advances to Nicolas Tenzer, a teacher in Geostrategy in Sciences Po.
“It was also part of an Obama non -intervention policy,” continues the specialist in International Relations with BFMTV, author of Our war (Ed. Of the Observatory, 2024). A year earlier, the Democratic president had stopped hitting the Syrian regime after the chemical attacks in Ghouta, renouncing his own “red lines.”
“If Barack Obama had intervened in 2014, I think Russia, who was much less armed at that time than today, would have supported,” continues Nicolas Tenzer. When refusing to intervene, the US president “demonized the credibility of the American word,” he said.
The Budapest episode remained recorded in the memory of the Ukrainians. “We trust them, but in fact, we made a historical mistake. Today, the Ukrainians have the feeling of paying this error for their own blood,” said a Ukrainian soldier in Franceinfo last March. “If we still had these nuclear weapons, Putin would never have dared to attack Ukraine,” said another soldier.
“Today, even if President Zelensky does not show it, the Ukrainians are still extraordinarily skeptical about the American desire to protect them,” said Nicolas Tenzer. At this point, few details of the meetings between Donald Trump and European leaders have emerged, this Monday at the White House. The US president was content to mention “guarantees that would be provided by several European countries, in coordination with the United States of America.”
Source: BFM TV
