A member of Ukraine’s parliament called Joe Biden’s state of the union speech a “total disappointment.”
Oleksandra Ustinova, appearing on NBC’s Today Show, expressed frustration that Biden and NATO weren’t doing enough to protect Ukrainian air space.
“To be honest, it was a total disappointment for us,” she told Savannah Guthrie. “I can explain why. Today, the whole world is watching Ukrainians being executed. I cannot name it the other way around.”
Ustinova makes a point that has been made by many Ukrainians in recent weeks. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, there were thousands of nuclear weapons on Ukrainian soil. Ukraine agreed to give those weapons up in exchange for security guarantees — guarantees that are now being honored in the breach by the West.
“The right definition is an execution because we see bombs going into our civilian houses every day, we see children dying every day on the streets or in their houses if they didn’t make it to the bomb shelter, we see bombs coming to the orphanages, to the schools. And we had been promised a protection by the international community. We gave up our nuclear weapons.”
Ukraine once possessed the world’s third-largest arsenal of nuclear weapons following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.
However, the sovereign nation signed the Budapest Memorandum in 1994 in which Russia, Britain and the U.S. committed to refrain from attacking Ukraine in exchange for the country turning over its nuclear arsenal to Russia to be dismantled.
The Budapest Memorandum was supposed to protect Ukraine. It didn’t, and Russia has now blown up that post-cold war architecture.
To solidify security commitments to Ukraine, the United States, Russia, and the United Kingdom signed the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances on December 5, 1994. A political agreement in accordance with the principles of the Helsinki Accords, the memorandum included security assurances against the threat or use of force against Ukraine’s territory or political independence. The countries promised to respect the sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine. Parallel memorandums were signed for Belarus and Kazakhstan as well. In response, Ukraine officially acceded to the NPT as a non-nuclear weapon state on December 5, 1994. That move met the final condition for ratification of START, and on the same day, the five START states-parties exchanged instruments of ratification, bringing the treaty into force.
The security arrangements were vague and not directed against a specific country. But does Ukraine really have a case that we let them down?
“What is the red line that (Vladimir) Putin has to cross for NATO and the U.S. to step in?” she said. “We’re not asking for boots on the ground. We’re asking for the iron dome or for the no-fly zone.
“We need the protection of the sky so that the bombs and the missiles do not hit our children. Every time I hear about the possible provocation from Putin — Putin is a psycho. He doesn’t need to be provoked. We did not do anything. We didn’t do anything in 2014, we did not provoke him now. He still invaded, and he’s bombing the cities, he’s bombing the civilians.”
The Iron Dome is not ours to give. We developed the anti-missile system in tandem with the Israelis who have already vetoed the weapons going to Ukraine.
And there’s no chance that the U.S. would establish a “No-Fly” zone over the cities of Ukraine. Russia wouldn’t respect it, which would mean confrontation in the skies between Russia and the United States.
Yes, the United States has failed to live up to the security guarantees we gave Ukraine 25 years ago. But it’s a much different world today, and Putin has destroyed any agreements that restricted Russian actions.
