The Act of Declaration of Independence by Ukraine on August 24, 1991, followed by the Ukrainian Independence Referendum on December 1, 1991, and legally recognized by the Russian Federation on December 2, 1991, was reaffirmed by the latter in the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances at the OSCE conference in Budapest, Hungary, on December 5, 1994. The Memorandum prohibited the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States of America from threatening or using military force or economic coercion against Ukraine, except in self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.
This Memorandum on Ukraine was preceded by the Trilateral Statement and Accompanying Annex, signed jointly by President Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine, President Boris Yeltsin of Russia and President Bill Clinton of the United States of America in Moscow on January 14, 1994, about the transfer of all strategic warheads within Ukrainian territory to Russia, in exchange for security assurances respecting the inviolability of Ukrainian sovereignty within the confines of its existing borders.
Then came the infamous Putin speech on February 10, 2007, at the Munich Security Conference. The entire content of this speech was a long hypocritical as well as duplicitous analysis of the forces arrayed on both sides of the life and death struggle between the righteous, moral and upright Russian state and the incorrigibly evil United States of America, its allies, friends and even sympathizers. Moreover, the speech contained the pious assertion of the two sides’ irreconcilable enmity, and a self-serving description of the most strategic engagement in that struggle: the unavoidable war of liberation against the monopolistic West that has always been hell bent to totally subjugate its adversaries. Finally, he complained that Russia’s enemies hate the Russian people and all the like minded nations because they are qualitatively better than their opponents. For these reasons, Russia must be decisively courageous because thus it will be triumphant over its enemies across the globe.
Having been convinced himself that the key distinction between the “inhuman” western democracies and the supremely spiritual Russian people with their deep religious understanding is that worldly gains in the minds of the Russian people have eternally been subordinated to the ethos of Russian World and immaterial spiritual humility, President Putin has completed his circuitous journey from the belated attempts of reforming Russia to the most basic perversion of liberty, the eponymous Russian imperial tyranny. Thus, the selfish pursuit of individual life, liberty and happiness, in short, undignified longing for everything unspiritual are all “Western” traits that, in turn, have historically contributed to the ubiquitous decline of mankind. To reinforce his psychopathological Weltanschauung cum worldview, President Putin reiterated ad nauseam his lies about Russia’s enemies in the Crimean as well as in the Valdai speeches in March and in October 2014 respectively, accusing especially the United States of America of being bereft of common sense and moral responsibility in international relations.
As a consequence, all the previously agreed upon agreements came to naught when the illegal Russian wars of 2014 and 2022 against Ukraine have commenced. As by now even President Putin’s closest fellow travelers have confessed, there were neither factual reasons, nor concrete threats against Russia, nor irreconcilable conflict of interests, but a host of grave internal problems, not unlike those that caused the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union, that have made President Putin to take the fateful decision to close the unfinished conquest of Ukraine. Ukraine has had no Nazis in its government, has not committed genocide against the Russian minority and has had no chance to join expeditiously to NATO or the European Union. Yet, having presented his false construction of realities to his people and the rest of the world, President Putin has embarked on his self-defeating “Special MIlitary Operation.” Clearly, his deliberately erroneous understanding of reality has become his Catch- 22 undoing. More bluntly, his self-created cult of personality has become Russia’s cult of treacherous unrealities.
Presently, Putin’s illegal war has devastated Russia as well as Ukraine and, if continued indefinitely, will surely destroy the former because, paralyzed by hatred and fear, he will exclusively believe in insanely ruthless violence as the exclusive instrument of achieving peace for his state. On the other hand, concerning the United States of America, NATO, the European Union and all the other states who oppose Russia’s illegal aggression, they must maintain their unity in supporting Ukraine without being distracted by secondary considerations to avoid their own self-defeat. Moreover, they must state in unison that they will never force Ukraine to make peace with Russia that entails territorial concessions on the part of the former. Finally, after peace is achieved, Ukraine cannot abuse its victory.
The supreme strategic objective is to make peace and begin the difficult and costly task of reconstruction. Yet first, the lawless aggression against the international order in the European continent must be decisively defeated. Just as importantly, Russia must be shown a path to join the rest of the continent when its government understands that an outlier state, regardless of its size and nuclear capabilities, cannot repeatedly remain a menace for the rest of the continent and beyond.