Will America Keep Our Word to Ukraine?
As the Russian campaign of murder, rape, and destruction continues, America has both a moral and a legal obligation to defend Ukraine and enforce the Budapest Memorandum of 1994
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is visiting the United States today and speaking to a joint session of Congress.
He will be pushing back against those on both the extreme left and right who keep whining that in 1991 President George HW Bush said NATO would not expand toward Russia (a comment that was never reduced to writing and never part of any agreement) and the Minsk cease-fire Agreements, which President Putin declared on February 22 “no longer exist.”
Hopefully President Zelenskyy will remind Congress that America is party to an actual contractual agreement to protect the integrity of Ukraine’s borders, an agreement we signed to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world.
That’s the “Budapest Memorandum” of 1994, an agreement worked out just three years after the Soviet Union dissolved and Ukraine had again become an independent nation.
Through much of that year the UK, US, and Russia met repeatedly with Ukraine at a venue in Budapest provided and blessed by the UN…
