Cav's Place

After seeing Russia’s nauseating celebration of eight years since the annexation of Crimea, I stumbled into a good article about the failure of The Budapest Memorandum and its implications. What it shows is that the Western powers were as hesitant, or more exactly as cowardly, back then as well, wording it in a way that didn’t really offer guarantees, to the point that the support already offered now apparently respects the letter of the agreement, even though it obviously can’t in any way be seen as protecting Ukraine, and it definitely didn’t protect it at all in 2014.
That makes the fact that Ukraine is likely to agree to a neutral status, and likely also to restrictions on its military, pretty much an admission of defeat, and not only of Ukraine. Russia will be entirely justified in seeing this not only as a victory at the present time, but also as a clear signal that the door is left wide open for their next move, likely to come in a few more years. I mean, it’s one thing to realize that NATO is a defensive alliance that only works as long as it doesn’t have to actually defend, as long as it can keep running away from the very purpose it was founded for, and therefore admit that Ukraine, and in fact any country that’s actually threatened, by Russia in particular, and would therefore need it, will not be permitted to join, but quite another to actually agree to give up on even striving, and demanding, to join, in exchange for some other assurances in the form of an agreement that once again won’t even be worth the paper it’s written on, because Russia doesn’t care about treaties and agreements and is audacious enough to reach for everything it desires and the West, whether it cares or not, is cowardly enough to not stop them. The repeated statements that NATO remains “united” even against a no-fly zone, not to mention an actual direct intervention, is proof enough of that.
The European integration of Ukraine is a completely different matter, and will be a huge problem for reasons that go beyond the obvious, such as corruption and the rule of law, or the immense costs of rebuilding, EU membership also carrying expectations of a certain mindset and worldview shared by leaders as well as by the society as a whole. Hungary or Poland, not to mention the United Kingdom, and to a somewhat lesser extent several other countries, show what happens when that’s not the case, and in Ukraine’s case it’d probably be even worse, and that isn’t likely to change in the foreseeable future. However, the integration of the countries that are currently under threat from Russia, so Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova, into the military alliance created specifically to protect against just this threat, should be a given, and the countries threatened by China, the obvious one being Taiwan, should likely follow. Otherwise Russia, and maybe later also China, will just keep pushing, keep taking, and sooner rather than later force the West into another terrible, devastating, great war on their own terms. I’ll keep saying that this could have perhaps been prevented almost entirely back in 2008, but acting now rather than later may still prevent the worst of it.