A Brief History
On December 8, 1991, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus signed a treaty called the Belovezha Accords, an agreement that dissolved the USSR and put in its place the Commonwealth of Independent States. A key part of this treaty was each newly independent state guaranteeing the integrity of the territory of the other signatory states.
Digging Deeper
As if this sacred agreement was not enough, in 1994, Russia, along with the US and other countries as part of the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons further guaranteed the respect of the territory of Ukraine and other involved nations as part of the Budapest Memorandum, a pact among nuclear powers and former Soviet Republics to turn over Soviet era nuclear weapons to Russia in exchange for respect of national borders.
In 2014, Ukraine found out the sacred word of Russia meant nothing when Russia annexed the Crimea, and again in 2022 when Russia mounted a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Question for students (and subscribers): What sort of punishment should Russia get for violating these treaties? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Aderito, Vicente, et al, editors. Russia’s War on Ukraine: The Implications for the Global Nuclear Order. Springer, 2023.
Benjamin, Ernst. The Hidden Truths of the Ukraine War. Kindle, 2023.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by U. Ivanov / Ю. Иванов of the signing ceremony at Viskuli Government House, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.
