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The war in Ukraine has slowed down.
It’s winter, they say.
But should it?
Russian missiles keep falling on Ukrainians, killing them and destroying their infrastructure.
Should this not be a time to press on, to give Ukraine better weapons,
the kind that may unsettle Putin and draw him to, once again, threaten us and the world with his nuclear weapons?
With the help of China he has managed to circumvent many of the sanctions the West has imposed. So China is clearly an accomplice in this confrontation. The help they provide Putin leads to more Ukrainian lives lost and more destruction of property.
In 1994, three years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, we signed the Budapest Memorandum, along with Britain and Russia, guaranteeing Ukraine’s sovereignty in exchange for the surrender of their nuclear weapons. If they had those nuclear weapons today,
there would have been no war. The thousands of lives lost would have been spared.
The billions of dollars spent would have been put to other uses. The misery would not have happened.
Somehow, the West, exulting that the Soviet Union had been dissolved in 1991, miscalculated.
We trusted that there would be respect for agreements made.
But 20 years later, in 2014, Putin chose to invade Crimea and the Eastern section of Ukraine.
Obama was president and he let it happen. Yes. Let it happen. Whatever he was doing, he said, ‘Oh well, Russians will be Russians. It’s just Crimea.’
Given that…
