I remember hearing about it when it happened and found it hilarious. Wagner mercs realizing that papa Putin doesn't care if they die (there was some audio clip circulating). Wagner mercenaries have been known to be pretty nasty (not unique to them of course, Americans have Blackwater and its successors).

Immediately after it happened trump withdraw US soldiers from Syria. I guess Vlad got really upset.

Considering that Russia attacked them, I think any entitlements in the memorandum are null in their eyes. The agreement is effectively nullified. From what I've briefly read, the document is not forcing any party to assist Ukraine, beyond advocating for them at the UN security council.

I'd say the main difference here is that Ukraine probably wanted the "support" of the US. I think we did alright giving them access to money, weapons and training to defend themselves early on, and the major shortcoming was limiting the targets that they could strike with the weapons we sold. Turnabout is fair play, if Vlad wants to start throwing hands, he has to accept that he may get punched in the face.

No it does not. Not even a little bit.

The Budapest memorandum A) isn’t even a binding treaty. And B) only guarantees assurances from the US, UK, and Russia that they won’t invade Ukraine.

There are absolutely ZERO provisions for the US giving military defense to Ukraine in the event they are invaded.

The US and UK have upheld that. Neither have ever invaded Ukraine.

That is a very short-sighted view. The US' role as world police allowed it to station troops all over the world, projecting power and influence in every corner of the world. Every deal any country in the world made, always at least considered a US deal. The US was able to influence politics without actually having to flex the military muscle. They could always still do that if diplomacy didn't work. The projection of scientific and cultural power was also part of that influence.

yes

Maybe it's a filter of my English-speaking internet circles, but I've never seen memes like this about France or the UK. So you could replace the flags... The point is that it doesn't seem to happen.

They do expire. Problem is that there's a lot of them. Fire 100 nukes, and even if 99% fail, that's at least one mushroom cloud in the most fertile land on earth. And the ones that did expire become essentially dirty bombs.

Honestly mostly just the latter. Was joking that they would've maintained them so badly that none of the nukes would make it out of their silos, even if they were still capable of detonation.

While I was aware the warheads require maintainance, @impairedimperator@lemmy.zip definitely said it better than I could.

That's why I'm so confused about the lukewarm support. From a purely capitalist lens, Ukraine could have been exploited to hell and back once Russia was BTFOd. But now they're looking at a decades long demining operation which is gonna hurt the exploitation effort bottom line billionaires pockets uhhhhh something.