Putin Stealing Pieces of Ukraine

 

Putin Stealing Pieces of Ukraine

 A little summary of history.

 In the finaldecades of its existence, the Soviet Union officially consisted of fifteen Soviet Socialist Republics (SSRs).

 Outside the territory of the Russian Federation, the republics were constituted mostly in lands that had formerly belonged to the Russian Empire and had been acquired by it between the 1700 Great Northern War and the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907.

 In 1944, amendments to the Soviet constitution allowed for two Soviet Republics, Ukraine and Byelorussia, (as well as the USSR as a whole) to join the United Nations General Assembly as founding members.

 All of the former Republics of the Union are now independent countries, with ten of them (all except the Baltic states, Georgia and Ukraine) being very loosely organized under the heading of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

 When the U.S.S.R. dissolved in the 1990’s, 3,200 strategic nuclear warheads remained in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus.  All of these have been deactivated and returned to Russia or scrapped.

 Ukraine held about one third of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, the third largest in the world at the time, approximately 1,700 warheads. In 1994 Ukraine agreed to give the weapons to Russia, or destroy them, and to sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.  Ukraine did all that was asked of them concerning nuclear weapons.  A side note – Leonid Kravchuk, back then, and Ukraine did not control these nukes, - the codes were held by Moscow. 

 The Budapest Memorandum of 1994, included security assurances against threats or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, in return for their giving up their nuclear weapons and signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

 The security assurances of the Budapest Memorandum are now being trampled under Russian soldiers’ boots in the Crimea, and in Donetsk and Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine.  Another unconscionable betrayal of a sovereign country, met with talk, talk, talk, of sanctions, and about the sixtieth? “executive order” by the teleprompter reading Joe Biden.  Once again, the world has betrayed a relatively helpless and relatively innocent country.

 As an aside, I don’t know my relatives in Southeastern Poland, of which there should be many cousins, nephews, nieces, and such.  My mother emigrated from Nieczajna Gorna, a rural area near Dabrowa-Tarnowska, which is about 100 miles from the Ukrainian border.  My paternal grandfather came from Jaslo, some 40 miles southeast of N.G., and about 70 miles from Ukraine.  Both of these areas are just west of where the 82^nd Airborne recently placed 3,000 U.S. Troops, about 60 miles from the Ukrainian border.  

 Ukraine gave up 1,700 nuclear warheads which were on their territory in 1994, in return for security for their country as defined in the Budapest memorandum, drawing on the 1975 Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Helsinki Accords and the “Helsinki Final Act” treaty. 

 Obama effectively acquiesced while Putin seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, in violation of the Budapest Memorandum.  Obama used words like “non-binding”.  Does that raise any hackles in response to Putin’s current moves in Eastern Ukraine?  Are they also moves that are “non-binding” by the Budapest Memorandum?  Do we also throw away the provisions of the Helsinki Accords?  Putin apparently thinks so.

 It occurs to me that if President Trump were still in office, (as some say he legally should be), Ukraine would already be in NATO, and Putin would not dare go up the “unpredictable, shoot from the hip”, Trump.  Even if not, Trump would most likely have sent 50-100,000 American troops to my ancestral area in Poland, rather than a meager 3,000, and more troops to the three Baltic states, perhaps to threaten Kalingrad, the little piece of Russia that gives them direct access to the Baltic?

 It is truly sad that our weak “woke” U.S. government with puerile empty hulk Joe Biden as figurehead, is literally “giving away the farm” to thugs like Putin and Erdogan, and to the really major international players like Xi Jinping, our real, long term rival.  We need to vote the clowns out of office and elect some grown-ups.

 Ray Gruszecki

Cold February 23, 2022