Many of us will have watched President Zelensky being berated in the Whitehouse for showing insufficient gratitude, and for not having come to terms with his aggressor sooner, given that he had “no cards” and that “Russia has all the cards”.
We will have followed subsequent events with equal misgivings as the USA has developed an increasingly transactional approach to Ukraine: access to its mineral wealth, and even some of its infrastructure, as payment for past and continued support. Whilst US negotiations with Putin appear increasingly to be to Ukraine’s disadvantage.
The truce in the Black Sea, for example, will free the Russian fleet which Ukraine has successfully confined to port, when Ukraine has already secured its routes for grain exports. Equally, though any relief for Ukraine’s energy structure is welcome, nevertheless the agreement will neuter Ukraine’s most effective strategy which has been to decimate Russia’s oil processing capacity (as I pointed out in this column on 15th Feb: Farage has tied his party’s fate to something over which he has no control )
On TV we have witnessed the appalling barbarity of Russian forces in Bakhmut, their ruthless targeting of civilians, the abduction of 700,000 children (the joint statement following US / Russian talks this week made no mention of them, but USA has withdrawn from the international working group investigating these Russian war crimes, and Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab, which was tracking 30,000 of the abductees have had their access to US intelligence systems withdrawn)
Despite our dislike and increasing horror at the way things appear to be turning out, isn’t the US entitled to put its own interests ahead of those of an unimportant far-away country, irrespective of how aggressively Ukraine has been attacked?
In answering that question we need to examine the commitments that we in the UK made, together with Russia and the USA.
In 1994 Ukraine had the third largest stockpile of nuclear weapons – 1,900 intercontinental nuclear missiles. Enormous pressure was brought to bear in order to get Ukraine to sign up to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and divest itself of the weapons. Notwithstanding the resignation of government ministers in protest, Ukraine complied by signing the Bucharest Memorandum at the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe on Dec 5 1994.
In return for giving up its nuclear weapons it received assurances with respect to its independence and territorial integrity from Russia, USA and UK.
What are those assurances worth?
The Ukrainian translation of the memorandum describes them as ‘guarantees’ but the English version only as ‘assurances’. The distinction is that the US and UK did not consider themselves committed to going to war on behalf of Ukraine, as implicit in a ‘guarantee’. Rather, that our commitment was limited to diplomatic and materiel support.
Russia insists that it has not abrogated the agreement, stating that its undertaking was only not to attack Ukraine with nuclear weapons. This is a monstrous re-writing of the Treaty. In any event, Russia has indeed threatened the use of nuclear weapons.
I am confident that, thus far, the United Kingdom has honoured its commitment.
But, as we watch events unfolding, I believe that we are entitled to ask ‘what is an assurance by the USA now actually worth?’