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THE EDITOR: As the world is gripped by the unfolding events in Ukraine, seeing Russian forces close the airspace in Kharkiv and move west of the Donbass towards Kyiv, many have begun pointing fingers at what they believe has caused this military aggression.
While Russian state propaganda claims that this is a "military exercise" to "denazilise Ukraine" and the political class of the US is busy trying to throw all the blame on Donald Trump or Joe Biden, we must look further to the root cause of this.
The moment Ukraine became an independent state at the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian leadership never saw the nation as anything other than rightful Russian territory. President Vladimir Putin going as far as to say on Monday that Ukraine has no right to statehood as it is a land that was built by and for Bolshiveks a century ago.
So with this as the political foundations of how the Russian Federation would see Ukraine, it would have been fundamental for Ukraine to be able to defend itself from military aggression such as Thursday's. At the aforementioned time of Ukrainian independence during the early 1990s, it had exactly what was required for its defence against Russia – one of the largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons in the world.
With the US and USSR maintaining nuclear weapons, as witnessed for decades, this fostered the fear of mutually shared destruction and thus was the strongest deterrent against a direct military attack and/or invasion. It was the fear of offensive nuclear repercussions that kept the Soviet Union, and to a significant extent the US, in line during the Cold War. A Ukraine with offensive nuclear capabilities – or at least a fraction of what it maintained at the cusp of independence – would have been enough to stave off Russian military intervention in Crimea and now.
The fear of future military conflict was on the mind of the West during the 1990s and it was in 1994, under the strong influence of the US and UK, that the government of Ukraine became a party to the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. What this agreement did was join Ukraine (and a couple other former Soviet states such as Kazakhstan) to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Ukraine therefore had to destroy its stockpile and decommission all infrastructure necessary to achieve offensive nuclear capabilities. In return for this, Ukraine and other Soviet states received the assurance, in written format, from Russia that it would never threaten the sovereignty of any of these states nor take aggressive military action against them, unprovoked.
The reality is that international law, including that agreement, is only as strong as the willingness of the party states to keep them, and the strength of said states to defy them knowing the repercussions. Therefore Russia, being a perpetually powerful, rich rogue actor with the tangible intent of reclaiming as much of the old Soviet Union as possible, would have inevitably violated this pact.
As Russia spent the last 20 years under Vladimir Putin violating the sovereignty of states such as Georgia and Belarus, and considering the relatively easy occupation of Ukraine's Crimea region in 2014, it was only a matter of time before the Kremlin came for the Donbass and, ultimately, all of Ukraine.
Today with Ukraine a sitting duck without any nuclear deterrent and at the mercy of a superior Russian military force and no substantial aid coming from NATO, the US and UK are busy pretending that the actions of previous administrations have not caused the helplessness of the Ukrainian people.
Although I often sympathise with the isolationists that can be found in the West, this is not one of those times as atonement is required today for the disastrous policies of yesteryear. The world's third largest nuclear power was reduced to a state dependent on US loans and EU promises in return for a paper promise from a patient, burgeoning Russian Federation.
Ultimately, this situation is more complex than you and I may believe or understand but undoubtedly the nation that was once the food basket of the Soviet Union and today is a strong partner in neon and natural gas to the West, requires much more than verbal uplifting.

JADE-MARK SONILAL

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