> Ukraine is in no military alliance
I agree with you this is the de facto situation, but they thought they were in an alliance because of the Budapest Memorandum.
I agree with you this is the de facto situation, but they thought they were in an alliance because of the Budapest Memorandum.
2. No point of the Budapest Memorandum implied that the signatories had to defend Ukraine.
Paragraph 4 essentially states that signatories have seek UN Security Council action if Ukraine became the victim of aggression or a threat of aggression involving nuclear weapons.
Ukraine isn't victim of aggression involving nuclear weapons, and even if it was, the signatories merely said they would escalate the matter to UN's security council.
Another paragraph had signatories (China, France, US, Russia, UK) to refrain from using force against Ukraine. Russia has violated this point.
All this lawyering-after-the-fact ignores that if what you say is true then Ukraine got screwed over, both by Russia and by the other signatories of that 'note'.
So, the normal response of other parties to such an agreement would be to ensure that all signatories stick to the agreement. Since the only party that conceivably could break it was Russia I'm pretty sure that that was taken into account when the agreement was signed, anything else would be stupendously naive.
The end result of this is that non-proliferation is dead, and that is a net negative for the whole world.
Ukraine had no alternative.
We have various analyses in the National Security Archives, reports and memoirs from US diplomats involved in the matter: the US was the primary actor that pressured Ukraine in giving up their nuclear stock pile.
Ukraine could not operate it (everything from security, cryptography, controls, navigations, etc was in Moscow anyway), could not maintain it, and could not even guard their stock pile.
The biggest risk for the United States was that with the rampant corruption and sell off of soviet weaponry on the black market there were the wrong incentives for too many actors that could bring soviet nuclear weapons in the hands of bad actors.