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Is This What Hope Feels Like?
Americans Are Not Silent
A Republican senator took to Elon Musk’s online money pit to publicly share her disgust at the current U.S. president’s despicable treatment of a war hero, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“I am sick to my stomach.”
Senator Lisa Murkowski tweeted outrage that reads like an understatement. But her sentiment, shared around the world, is all too physiologically accurate for Americans who assumed we would honor our 1994 security agreement with Ukraine when it joined the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Russian Federation in the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as a non-nuclear-weapons state.
“The signature of the so-called Budapest Memorandum concluded arduous negotiations that resulted in Ukraine’s agreement to relinquish the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, which the country inherited from the collapsed Soviet Union, and transfer all nuclear warheads to Russia for dismantlement. The signatories of the memorandum pledged to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and inviolability of its borders, and to refrain from the use or threat of military force. Russia breached these commitments with its annexation of Crimea in 2014 and aggression in eastern Ukraine, bringing the meaning and value of security assurance pledged in the…