Tribune. While Maroupol is consumed under the bombs, a great battle is preparing in the Donbass. At the same time, the Russian forces maintain their pressure on the port of Odessa, subjected to a naval blockade, and on the south of Ukraine, partially conquered. Regarding this geopolitical drama, the hope of diplomatic talks, with the objective of negotiating a neutral status for Ukraine, instead of an integration into NATO, leaves pensive.
Proponents of “Finnish”, term in vogue there are little more, make it a martingale. But what would be the reality of a “neutrality” imposed by the Russian bombs, in the name of the Slave-Orthodox fraternity, after the cutting of the Ukrainian state and its demilitarization?
What guarantees for this status of neutrality if Ukraine could not even maintain a strong national army, supported by military-industrial relations with Turkey and the Western powers, on a bilateral level and within the framework of the NATO Partnership -Ukraine? Including, neutrality would be more contingent; a prerequisite for the subjugation of Ukraine to the arbitrariness of the Kremlin.
Certainly, the Ukrainian part asks a number of powers to partner with this status of neutrality, that is to say, to provide security guarantees that would be equivalent to Article 5 of the Treaty of L ‘North Atlantic. But is not it what was planned by the Budapest Memorandum, signed on December 5, 1994? Ukraine renounced the nuclear weapon and undertook to sign and ratify the non-proliferation treaty. In return, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom guaranteed the security and territorial integrity of the country.
We know what happened next, Russia aggressing Ukraine as early as February 2014, to seize Manu Militari de la Crimea and trigger a “hybrid war” in the Donbass. Eight years later, this same revisionist power leads a high intensity war against Ukraine, not “at the gates of Europe”, but in the middle of the continent.
Remember that at the time of the coup on Crimea, kyiv had for several years lifted its NATO application to land in “non-aligned state” (2010). Obviously, it did not prevent the Kremlin from attacking this country, the only perspective of a free trade agreement with the European Union aroused Putin IRE. Do not mix the causes and consequences: it is the Russian aggression that explains the candidacy of Ukraine to NATO, not the opposite.
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