Any western government or leader surprised that Ukraine is now talking about developing their own nuclear weapons program needs to understand that they wouldn’t even be considering that if we had just fucking held up our end of the deal.

With the Budapest Memorandum, they surrendered their (former Soviet) nukes in exchange for security guarantees. The guarantees ended up being worth less than the paper they were written on. Ergo, Ukraine, seeking security guarantees on its own terms, feels compelled to re-develop nuclear weapons technology, because that’s a guarantee nobody’s going to be able to forcibly take from you once you have it.

I agree. They deserved one of two things in returned for giving up their nukes.

NATO membership.

Or a mutual defense treaty of the style seen in South Korea and Japan - i.e. Ukraine should come under the US nuclear umbrella.

Don't forget America pinky promised security guarantees

There are several countries who gave up WMDs, either deployed or in development. Iraq, Libya, South Africa, and Ukraine. Of these, only South Africa was left alone. And to be clear, two of the remaining three were attacked by the US.

So what we've done here is signal to the smaller powers that they should never negotiate away their WMDs. You're just going to get invaded, anyway. I can't blame smaller powers for going that way at all.

Edit: and to be extra clear, this also applies to Iran and N Korea. They have no incentive to give up their nuclear programs.

You know what? That's just fair. Everyone fucked Ukraine over with the Budapest memorandum so what else are they supposed to do?

They trusted Russia. Fatal mistake.

It was a rookie move to give it up, it was a rookie move not to strap up, it was a rookie move not have contiguency plans in place.

Being right and good guy dont do shit. Having your guns and plans is how you survive.

Sucks to suck but this is real politik.

With that said, nuclear detterance doctrine is utter failure and rules based international order is a sad joke.

US is helping israel do genocide

Russia got korea to enter the war on their side.

Ukraine weapons with millionn restrictions and limp dick supoort with from US and Germany.

Lord have mercy, hoepfully balts, nords and ee countries support is enough for ukraine. Otherwise they gonna die slowly.