this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2025
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Sometimes you can't reach people who insist on remaining ignorant. Your comment was very nuanced and would be very educational for someone who was actually open to being educated.
If i could add one correction however: you should not say that Ukraine "gave up it's nuclear arsenal" because that's not true. Ukraine never had nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union did. They were Soviet nuclear weapons that were merely stationed in Ukraine.
That makes a big difference. It would be like saying that Turkey has nuclear weapons just because the US has stationed nuclear weapons on their territory as part of NATO.
Ukraine did not inherit the military infrastructure for actually using those weapons, the codes for them, etc. The only inheritor of the Soviet nuclear arsenal is the Russian Federation because the control infrastructure for them was always centered around Moscow.
This is a commonly brought up talking point by supporters of Ukraine, that allegedly "Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons for security guarantees" but it is a myth, and it risks perpetuating dangerous misinformation. Not only were they not Ukraine's to give up, but the "security guarantees" were contingent on non outside interference in Ukraine and Ukraine remaining a neutral state. But that's a topic for another day...
i haven't thought about that to be honest. Reading the articles, it was just as if the nukes were somehow magically developed when Ukraine became "independent". Good point. Another thing I wanted to say, but couldn't as it would trigger a defense mechanism making them even more ignorant than they already are, is that Ukraine, Russia, and 13 other were never even states to begin with. Reading sources, almost every single one had the narrative of x gaining independence from the USSR as if before the USSR there were multiple states. Another aspect of this is when non-marxist people and scholars discuss a region in the USSR, they talk about it as if its some kind of occupied entity not as if it's a region of the USSR like for example Beijing is city in The PRC, which is the actual case.
Yeah, the USSR pretty much created Ukraine as a nation, same with Belarus. But this is even more extreme in the case of the central Asian republics where the Soviets had to do a lot of nation building just to create the nationalities that they packaged into the various Soviet Republics there. Before the Soviets these regions had little to no concept of a shared national identity and were just a lot disparate tribes. The borders there are quite artificial as a result of this and still cause problems today, just as the borders of Ukraine caused problems, just as the borders in the Caucasus caused problems (Abkhazia, Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh). They only made sense as internal administrative divisions of a larger whole.