In 1994, when Russia grabbed Crimea and started its war in Donbas, the USA under Obama did practically nothing. It gave Ukraine some aid that didn't include weapons, implemented some toothless sanctions, and that was it.
In 2022, when Russia started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the USA under Biden did something. It helped with money and weapons. But the help was always too little and too late to ensure a victory over Russia, and came with a string attached: not to be used for attacks on Russian soil. It was later revealed, in William Arkin's 2023 Newsweek article Exclusive: The CIA's Blind Spot about the Ukraine War, that Biden's officials secretly made a deal with Putin to prevent Ukraine from "any actions that might threaten Russia itself", and in exchange, Putin wouldn't "escalate the war beyond Ukraine". In other words, the USA, while doing lip service to the heroic struggle of the Ukrainians, in fact bound their hands and offered them to Putin for extermination.
Moreover, as the German newspapre Bildreported, the Biden administration, by not delivering enough aid, sought to force Ukrainian leadership to negotiate with Russia and surrender some territories, rewarding Putin's aggression and land grab: "The U.S. and Germany allegedly hope to nudge Ukraine to negotiate with Russia through a carefully targeted scope of arms deliveries... Kyiv's two leading military donors... plan to provide the exact
quantity and quality of arms to ensure that Ukraine can hold the front
and have a strong negotiating position, but not enough to fully liberate
its territory."
In fact, things have become worse. As a result of the policy of the Republican Party, which has by now become strongly pro-Russian, US aid to Ukraine stopped altogether about half a year ago.
Ordinary Americans, as far as I can see, sympathize with Ukraine but not enough to want their tax money used to rescue it. They think that it is too bad that Russia has attacked Ukraine but the USA should not send more aid because it hasn't enough money for its own citizens. In addition, they don't want "escalation", i.e. nuclear war. In their minds, angering Putin is "escalation" while the full destruction of Ukraine isn't.
What they don't know, or rather don't want to know, is that the USA has an obligation to defend Ukraine. It is called the Budapest Memorandum and it was signed thirty years ago, in 1994. According to it, Ukraine would surrender its nuclear arsenal (third largest in the world) to Russia. In return, Russia, the USA (under Clinton) and the UK would "respect the signatory's independence and sovereignty in the existing borders". Ukraine, which was a newly independent country by this time, perceived the promise of the three superpowers as a guarantee, while they perceived it as empty words.
Recently, Clinton expressed regrets about persuading Ukraine to denuclearize: “I feel a personal stake because I got them (Ukraine) to agree to give
up their nuclear weapons. And none of them believe that Russia would
have pulled this stunt if Ukraine still had their weapons.” He is right. Ukraine is being destroyed and hundreds of thousands of valiant Ukrainians have already been murdered because the USA tricked and betrayed it with a false promise.
The Budapest Memorandum is little known among Americans. They don't know about it because they don't want to. When I write about it in comments to Yahoo!News articles, I get multiple downvotes. The great American nation which I admired is no more. Today's America is full of people who lack the compassion to sympathize with an innocent nation subjected to a genocide, lack the sense to realize that Putin will wage World War III unless stopped in Ukraine, lack the honor to keep their country's pledge, and lack the courage to stand up to a rogue nuclear power. In addition, despite living in the strongest economy in the world, they somehow cannot make a decent earning, and are sure that this is because the USA gives too much aid to Ukraine.
I don't say that such heartless, mindless, greedy, whiny, pathetic losers are all present-day Americans, or even the majority of them. But it is an undeniable fact is that their proportion is large enough to shape the present American policy.
America is done for. It has been reduced to a shadow of its former self. But we mustn't allow its victim, Ukraine, to be dragged down and perish.
Karolina Hird, Riley Bailey, Grace Mappes, and Frederick W. Kagan
March 14, 2024, 8:15pm ET
"Russian Security Council Deputy Chairperson Dmitry Medvedev
posted a detailed call for the total elimination of the Ukrainian state
and its absorption into the Russian Federation under what he
euphemistically called a “peace formula.”[1] Medvedev’s
demands are not novel but rather represent the Kremlin’s actual
intentions for Ukraine — intentions that leave no room for negotiations
for purposes other than setting the precise terms of Ukraine’s complete
capitulation. Medvedev begins the “peace plan” by rhetorically
stripping Ukraine of its sovereignty, referring to it as a “former”
country and placing the name Ukraine in quotation marks. Medvedev laid
out the seven points of his “peace formula,” which he sardonically
described as “calm,” “realistic,” “humane,” and “soft.”[2] The seven
points include: Ukraine’s recognition of its military defeat, complete
and unconditional Ukrainian surrender, and full “demilitarization”;
recognition by the entire international community of Ukraine’s “Nazi
character” and the “denazification” of Ukraine’s government; a United
Nations (UN) statement stripping Ukraine of its status as a sovereign
state under international law, and a declaration that any successor
states to Ukraine will be forbidden to join any military alliances
without Russian consent; the resignation of all Ukrainian authorities
and immediate provisional parliamentary elections; Ukrainian reparations
to be paid to Russia; official recognition by the interim parliament to
be elected following the resignation of Ukraine’s current government
that all Ukrainian territory is part of Russia and the adoption of a
“reunification” act bringing Ukrainian territory into the Russian
Federation; and finally the dissolution of this provisional parliament
and UN acceptance of Ukraine’s “reunification” with Russia.[3]
The tone of Medvedev’s post is deliberately sardonic, and the calls he
is making appear extreme, but every one of the seven points in
Medvedev’s “peace formula” are real and central pieces of the Kremlin’s
ideology and stated war aims and justifications — Medvedev just
simplified and synthesized them into a single brutal Telegram post. The
first two of the seven points call for the complete military defeat,
disarmament, “demilitarization,” and “denazification” of Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin identified the full “demilitarization”
(stripping Ukraine of all its military and self-defense capabilities)
and “denazification” (complete regime change) as Russia’s main goals in
Ukraine when initially announcing the invasion on February 24, 2022.
Putin and other Kremlin officials have frequently re-emphasized these
goals in the subsequent two years of the war.[4] Medvedev’s calls for
the resignation of all Ukrainian authorities and the creation of a new
provisional government are calls for regime change simply made with more
specificity about the methods. The demand that any successor state to
Ukraine be forbidden to join military alliances without Russian
permission is a call for Ukraine’s permanent neutrality, a demand that
Putin and other Kremlin officials reiterate regularly.[5]
Putin established the principles that align the Kremlin’s objectives in
Ukraine with Medvedev’s seven points in Putin’s 2021 essay “On the
Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” Putin claimed in that
article that Ukrainians and Russians are historically one united people
who were violently and unjustly separated by external nefarious
forces.[6] Putin used this essay to undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty and
claims over its own political, social, historical, linguistic, and
cultural development — all suggestions that underpin Medvedev’s calls to
dissolve Ukraine as a legal entity and fully absorb it into the Russian
Federation. Putin and other Russian officials have long set
informational conditions to define Ukraine as an integral and
inseparable part of Russian territory and set Russia’s goal in Ukraine
as “reuniting” Ukrainian territories with their supposed historic
motherland.[7] Medvedev’s “peace formula” makes explicit and
brutal what Putin and the Kremlin have long demanded in somewhat more
euphemistic phrases: that peace for Russia means the end of Ukraine as a
sovereign and independent state of any sort with any borders. Those
advocating for pressing Ukraine to enter negotiations with Russia would
do well to reckon with this constantly reiterated Russian position."
The photo below is from the Ukrainian town of Chasiv Yar which is at risk now that the Russian invaders have taken Avdiivka.
“We are not asking too much,” reads the graffiti in Chasiv Yar, which
two years of intense fighting has slowly razed to the ground. “We just
need artillery shells and aviation. Rest we do ourselves. Armed Forces
of Ukraine.”
I don’t fault any Zionist or ally of Israel for having embraced the
two-state solution, as I did for many years. No other peace plan could
reconcile self-interest and lofty principles so seamlessly...
The two-state solution was also naturally appealing to Israel’s friends
in the West, especially liberal Jews: Faced with attempts to paint
Zionism as colonialism, Judaism as fundamentalist messianism, the IDF as
an army of occupation, or Israel as an apartheid state, the two-state
solution would dissolve such smears with a single flourish.
But compelling as it is as a debating strategy, or a form of
self-therapy, the two-state solution is, sadly, no solution at all.
Rather, it is a big step down the road to another Lebanon. It would doom
the Zionist project, not save it, while producing much greater misery
and more bloodshed for Israelis and Palestinians alike. By now most of
us in Israel understand this dreadful math. If there was still a
substantial minority among us who clung to the two-state promise against
the evidence of the Second Intifada and everything that followed, that
minority has shrunk considerably since Oct. 7.
We now know exactly what our would-be neighbors have in mind for us. We
see that a majority of Palestinians support Hamas and are well pleased
by its massacres. Most of us therefore believe that turning Judea and
Samaria into another Hamastan to satisfy those who see the massacre as
an inspiration and its perpetrators as role models would be suicidal.
Who in their right mind would inflict the ensuing bloodshed on their
partners, children, friends, and parents? If one is determined to feel
overwhelming sympathy for one of the many stateless peoples of the
world, why not start with the Kurds, or the Catalans, or the Basques, or
the Rohingya, or the Baluchis, or any of one of dozens of subnational
groups—none of whom seem likely to attain their longed-for goals of
statehood anytime soon. After all, it took nearly 2,000 years for the
Jews to succeed in refounding their state. If the Palestinians are
determined to kill us on the road to replacing us, then presumably they
can wait, too...
To be sure, the two-state solution was a noble dream. But it turns out
it always was just that—a dream. What enabled those who clung to it long
enough to continue sleepwalking through the wrecks of exploding buses,
the bodies of slain civilians, the constant wild calls for violence
against us, the massive efforts to build terror infrastructures under
our noses and on our borders, was our own tendency to imagine
Palestinians in our own image. For all the fashionable talk of
diversity, we too find it hard to imagine a people that is not like
ourselves. Knowing our own striving for self-determination, we assumed
that the Palestinians, too, want above all to be masters of their own
fate in their own sovereign state.
But that is not what they want. The huge amount of international aid
Palestinians have received since 1948 was never used for
nation-building. It wasn’t used for building houses and roads or for
planting orange groves. It was harnessed to one overarching cause: the
destruction of the Jewish state. This is what the United Nations Relief
and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) does: subsidize and
shield Palestinian terror infrastructure. This is what the PA does with
its pay-for-slay salaries—underwritten by the U.S.—to the families of
terrorists. And this is what Hamas was able to do as a result of the
billions invested in Gaza: It bought weapons, trained terrorists, and
built a sprawling network of terror tunnels—and not one bomb shelter for
civilians.
As Einat Wilf and Adi Schwarz demonstrate in their bestselling book The War of Return,
the Palestinian national movement has built its ethos and identity
around the so-called “right of return” of the Palestinian “refugees”—by
which they mean the destruction of Israel through the resettlement of
the Palestinian diaspora, the so-called refugees that UNRWA numbers at
5.9 million, within Israel’s borders. But there’s no such thing as the
right of return: First, it is not an internationally recognized right;
second, if implemented it would not be a return, since almost all of
those who demand it have never been to Israel themselves. And finally,
of those who fled or were expelled from the land of Israel in 1948, only
an estimated 30,000 are still alive today.
No other group of people on Earth is considered to be refugees decades
after so many of its members have resettled as passport-holding citizens
of other countries. No other group has its refugee status conferred
automatically on its offspring. And no group of actual refugees is
excluded from the purview of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR), entrusted instead to the care of a special agency, UNRWA, whose
mandate is to perpetuate the problem rather than solve it. UNRWA
cultivates Palestinian hopes for a “free” Palestine “from the river to
the sea,” allows for weapons to be stored inside its facilities and schools, and for a Hamas intelligence and communications center to be built under its headquarters, indoctrinates children to glorify terrorists—whom it also employs—and disseminates wild antisemitism,
while still steering clear of what it should have been doing all along:
resettling those who were, or still are, actual refugees.
What the centrality of the “right of return” to the Palestinian ethos
means, of course, is that Palestinian identity itself is structured as a
rejection of the two-state solution, and denies the legitimacy of any
form of Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the land of Israel. The two-state
solution presupposes mutual recognition between both peoples. Each
would affirm the right of the other to national self-determination. If
you demand partition but also insist on the right of return then what
you are really asking for is a two-Palestinian-states solution: one
state in the West Bank and Gaza, ethnically cleansed of Jewish settlers,
and one in Israel, where the Jews would eventually become a minority,
and would consequently suffer the fate of the Jewish communities in
every other Arab state. There has never been a Palestinian leadership
ready to give up the right of return, which means that they have always
manipulated their Israeli counterparts, as well as all mediators
(including, of course, American mediators) with fake negotiations
intended to extract temporary benefits, and to buy time, in preparation
for the larger goal of eradicating all traces of Jewish sovereignty
between the river and the sea. Fortunately, they have failed each time.
But failure hardly keeps them from trying.
There never was a Palestinian leadership ready to recognize the
legitimacy of a Jewish nation-state. That is a constant fact of life in
the conflict. The Arab side has rejected any and all partition plans
starting with the Peel Commission in 1937, the United Nations partition
resolution of 1947, and all the way through the various American
mediation plans and Israeli offers, and those offered by Israeli
leaders, including the Camp David 2000 offer, in which Prime Minister
Ehud Barak agreed to the partition of Jerusalem, and the further
concessions offered later by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. All have
crashed on the nonnegotiable demand for the right of return. Even
Salam Fayyad, the technocrat former Palestinian prime minister, a
figurehead with no popular support at home but beloved by Western peace
processors—and who’s receiving renewed attention in
administration-friendly media—insisted on the right of return in an article he wrote mere days after the Oct. 7 pogrom.
Luckily,
the Palestinians were never patient enough to even temporarily put a
stop to terrorism or defer their demand for return until they could
muster better-organized forces. It seems that the cult of death and the
worship of martyrs make for an addiction to terror, and a need for
violent venting. If you bring your children from kindergarten to stage
plays where they pretend to kill Jews, you cannot also tell them to hold
back forever on acting them out once they’ve grown up. The tree of
Palestinian identity, it seems, must be constantly watered with the
blood of Jews to sustain it through the many sacrifices required for a
nonproductive life of permanent victimhood.
Had our neighbors been able to restrain themselves for a time, our
seduction by the two-state illusion, the game we played with ourselves
to relieve our moral pangs from the imperative to rule over another
people, could easily have been fatal...
Israel is a strong country, but it is also a small country surrounded by
enemies. It is important for Israel to mark the difference between
embracing folly and being polite. It is time that Israel and her leaders
be more vocal about the folly of America’s misguided Middle East
policy. We can afford to continue limping along with the burdens of the
occupation for another generation or two, by which point many unforeseen
things will have come to pass that may make a solution either more or
less obvious. But we will not live that long if we are once again
seduced by the two-state siren song."
When I leaned that the PA pays sizable sums to the families of
terrorists for committing their acts of terror against innocent Israelis
with money it receives from Europe and the US my stomach sank and I
understood immediately there is no effing way that a two state
settlement is a viable solution to the conflict.
There is just no way to live in peace next to a state and people who
value their own deaths and the deaths of their enemy more than their
self determination and peaceful development. It’s impossible. That’s the
sad reality Israelis have to live with."
"Doug
A point about language: perhaps best to refrain from using the
terms set by one’s opponents. Whether that be in the DEI realm, “gender”
wars, or a host of other contentious topics, the “progressive” left
excels at dictating the terms of discussion and, thus, controlling the
perceptions and bounds of debate.
The two-state “solution.” Notice it isn’t a proposal, an idea, a
wish, a dream. It is a solution. Who could be against a solution? A
solution SOLVES things! Except that this “solution” would prove quite a
bit like another “Solution” the Jews once faced."
"OPINION: Australia – Let Ukraine Have Your “Retired” Taipan Helicopters
by Stefan Romaniw
The idea of transferring Australia’s retired fleet of MRH-90 helicopters to Ukraine
has been suggested by several parties since the government decided upon
early retirement. Yet the most recently reported development in the
MRH-90 saga is that the ADF plans to dismantle and bury these aircraft rather than donate them to Ukraine.
There are compelling reasons why donating the MRH-90 fleet to Ukraine makes much more sense than scrapping them.
Ukraine
has had a chronic shortage of helicopters since Russia initiated its
partial invasion in 2014, and its full-scale invasion of Ukraine almost
two years ago.
The Armed Forces of Ukraine inherited more than
400 military helicopters when the USSR collapsed three decades ago,
mostly Mi-8 HIP multi-purpose helicopters and Mi-24 HIND helicopter
gunships. By 2014 most of these helicopters were no longer airworthy,
with worn out engines, gearboxes and rotor blades, and many had been
cannibalized to keep others flying. Ukraine lacked production
capabilities for many spare parts and was only able to get replacement
rotor blades into production shortly before the 2022 full scale
invasion.
The Ukrainian helicopter fleet numbering a few dozen flyable aircraft
was heavily overused from the earliest days of the 2022 full-scale
invasion. During the Battle for Kyiv in the first weeks of the war, the
fleet was used round the clock to strike at Russian forces besieging the
capital, with many helicopters and courageous aircrew lost to Russian
air defenses. The besieged Ukrainian garrison at Mariupol was resupplied
for weeks by helicopters that flew in under Russian air defenses. But
that heroic operation ceased after the Russians blocked access and shot
down a flight killing the crew and wounded troops that were being
evacuated.
NATO allies, including the US, donated what remaining Soviet and Russian
helicopters they had to partially compensate for Ukraine's losses. The
fleet now comprises a proverbial “zoo” of no less than sixteen variants
of the two main helicopter types.
As the HIND gunships are scarce, many of the HIP transports have been
modified to fire Western supplied Hydra and Zuni air to surface
rockets. But modifying leftover transport helicopters into gunships
cannot not solve the more basic headache of a worn-out, understrength,
shrinking, and largely obsolete fleet of military helicopters.
Ukraine needs modern Western helicopters, both quickly, and in large numbers.
Why
the Australian government did not pre-emptively offer the MRH-90
helicopters to Ukraine when the decision was made on early retirement
remains an unanswered question. Agreeing to the ADF plan to scrap and
bury assets for which taxpayers had spent over $3 billion dollars, and
which have years of remaining life in them, qualifies as bizarre.
No
doubt the defense ministry can dredge up any number of irrelevant
“explanations”, as we have seen with their ongoing media campaign which
seems designed to discourage Ukraine from asking for the forty plus
mothballed RAAF F/A-18 Super Hornet multirole fighter aircraft.
Donating
the MRH-90 fleet, remaining spare parts, documentation and support
equipment does not incur any future financial or support obligations for
Australia. Variants of the NH-90 series are operated by nine European
allies of Ukraine all of whom have been generous donors of military
equipment and training.
Ukraine already operates the Airbus Super Puma and has established
supply chains in Europe. So, the supply chain and maintenance woes that
bedeviled the ADF while operating the MRH-90 simply do not apply to
Ukraine – Ukraine's European allies can solve these problems.
No
differently, airlifting the MRH-90 fleet to Europe is also a task
Ukraine's other allies can handle should the defense department decide
that it is too expensive or inconvenient.
Donating the remaining
MRH-90s to Ukraine would offer a strategic payoff to Australia. Russia's
long running campaign to destabilize Europe and the Middle East, and
meddle in Western politics, directly threatens Australia's interests as a
global exporter.
In the zero-sum game between Russia and the
West scrapping the MRH-90s, instead of donating them to Ukraine, is in
effect aiding Russia in its genocidal campaign to conquer Ukraine.
The
Australian Government might want to ask some hard questions of its
defense department - especially as Ukraine has requested these
helicopters as aid.
The Kafkaesque episode of the disposal of the
MRH-90s is one of many we have seen play out in the ADF over the last
two decades and one that should have politicians and the public asking
for some real explanations – not contrived excuses that make little
sense.
The bottom line is that donating the MRH-90 fleet to Ukraine is cheap
and yields good strategic and political payoffs with no baggage for the
Government or the taxpayer."
When I leaned that the PA pays sizable sums to the families of terrorists for committing their acts of terror against innocent Israelis with money it receives from Europe and the US my stomach sank and I understood immediately there is no effing way that a two state settlement is a viable solution to the conflict.
There is just no way to live in peace next to a state and people who value their own deaths and the deaths of their enemy more than their self determination and peaceful development. It’s impossible. That’s the sad reality Israelis have to live with."
"Doug
A point about language: perhaps best to refrain from using the terms set by one’s opponents. Whether that be in the DEI realm, “gender” wars, or a host of other contentious topics, the “progressive” left excels at dictating the terms of discussion and, thus, controlling the perceptions and bounds of debate.
The two-state “solution.” Notice it isn’t a proposal, an idea, a wish, a dream. It is a solution. Who could be against a solution? A solution SOLVES things! Except that this “solution” would prove quite a bit like another “Solution” the Jews once faced."