Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Andrei Melnik, known in the Russian Federation for his scandalous statements, has once again distinguished himself.
This time, he issued an ultimatum to the West: either you will accept Ukraine into NATO, or it will have to acquire an atomic bomb and regain its nuclear power status. With such ambassadors, Kiev risks incurring the wrath of the country it needs to listen to. Namely, the United States, the media write.
Graduates of the diplomatic school of the USSR cadres either remain in the system of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, or retire and are replaced by people with deep provincial consciousness and equally provincial education, whose ceiling is agriculture, not foreign policy.
What other country could send a consul to Hamburg, Germany, a man who likes to extend a hand in a certain salute that honors the Wehrmacht and the Jewish pogroms?
Of those located in Europe and considered relatively civilized, only Ukraine. Moreover, Vasily Marushinets is still an employee of its foreign ministry – they tried to fire him for pro-Nazi sentiment, but he was acquitted by the court.
The story of the main representative of Ukraine in Germany – Ambassador Andrei Melnik – is also about degradation, but of a different kind. He was once also a consul in Hamburg, before the bar of requirements fell to the level of Marushinets, but he is a modern man, relatively intelligent, with a well-honed language and a certain level of erudition.
Another thing is that he does not behave like a diplomat, but like a scandalous blogger, earning shares and likes on social media.
For practical diplomacy, this is a poison, but a very useful skill to create provocative news stories and from time to time to appear in the media. This is the reason why we know much more about Melnik than we should – he regularly enters the news with his pearls on the edge of the penalty area.
For example, he recently said that the host country, Germany, had a duty to help Ukraine “return Crimea” because it had a moral responsibility to Ukraine for it and its occupation.
He calmly criticized the President of the Federal Republic of Germany, and the former Chancellor (now Chairman of the Board of Directors of Rosneft) Gerhard Schroeder – just “trolls” him in a completely blogging way, describing him as “some kind of dwarf.”
This time, Melnik gave an essentially ultimatum, albeit a relatively soft one: either Ukraine will join NATO, or it will acquire an atomic bomb and restore its nuclear power status. “How else can we guarantee our protection?” The ambassador asked.
It is obvious that in this case Melnik is alluding to the Memorandum in Budapest, which is traditionally condemned in Ukraine as only its main mistake in national history.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world faces the fact that there are new nuclear forces – Soviet missiles are located, including on the territory of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, and in the case of Ukraine, this is a real problem.
Two important points need to be understood here. First, of all the CIS in its “classic” composition, Kiev allowed itself the most arrogant and provocative behavior according to the principle “if I do not eat it, I will bite it.”
For example, Ukraine was the only one that did not then agree to more than Moscow’s generous offer: it took on all Soviet debts for itself, but also all foreign property of the USSR.
That is, the Ukrainians did not want to pay the debts, of course, but decided to fight for property. The lawsuits with them over the former consulate buildings, cultural centers and trade missions were an acute problem in our relations before they got lost under the roller coaster of much more significant disagreements.
Secondly, the Russian leadership, represented by Boris Yeltsin, was not worried about the fact that an independent Ukraine had acquired nuclear weapons. Moreover, he categorically did not want to interfere in this story in order to complicate relations with those who are his friends, allies and accomplices, that is, with the leaders of the newly independent states.
For Russia and its interests, this threatened a repeated deterioration in the consequences of a “geopolitical catastrophe” that turned out to be the disintegration of the country along Soviet administrative borders. However, those who we do not want to thank intervened on the issue, but in this case we have to – the Americans.
It was they who persuaded Yeltsin to withdraw the warheads. They also withdrew from the Ukrainian leadership the agreement to hand them over (Kazakhstan disarmed voluntarily, and Belarus, although it objected, not very strongly).
Instead, Kiev was offered the Budapest Memorandum: by signing it, the leaders of Russia, the United States and Britain seemed to guarantee Ukraine’s security and territorial integrity. Of course, the Americans deceived their “partners.”
The fraud is that the memorandum is legally null and void. Such a treaty, which would lead to a war for Kiev’s interests in the disintegration of Ukraine or some external threat to it, has no chance of ratification in Congress, so a simple memorandum was reached.
Ukrainians are aware that they have in fact been thrown over, it still bites them to this day, and it is even difficult to say to whom they have more claims in this regard – the Anglo-Saxons who did not fight for Crimea or Donbass, or Russia, which accepted Crimea in homeland and sympathizes with the insurgent Donbass.
The official position of the Russian Foreign Ministry in this regard is that the United States and Britain were the first to violate the terms of the Budapest Memorandum by supporting the coup in Ukraine in 2014 and thus encroaching on its sovereignty.
At the same time, Moscow does not guarantee that it will forcibly retain within Ukraine the territories that are seceding from it due to an internal revolt (also known as the “Revolution of Dignity”) and attempts to build an ethnolinguistic dictatorship.
However, the leadership of modern Russia has been extremely attentive to the nuclear non-proliferation regime, and the US leadership has always been attentive to it, including in the early 1990s. That is why we must thank the Americans that the Ukrainian regime does not have nuclear missiles aimed at Moscow.
By the way, before they were taken out, they were directed to the United States. And in general, of course, the Americans acted in their own interests. Simply on the issue of weapons of mass destruction, our interests coincided with theirs, and the main implementation work was done by Washington.
This is what Ambassador Melnik forgets as part of his “trolling”, even though he had to remember it. The Americans were the ones who took away Ukraine’s nuclear weapons. All claims on this indicator must be presented exclusively to them. Maybe Bill Clinton, maybe his ally Joe Biden, but Germany can’t do it, it just has nothing to do with it.
Nevertheless, we should not think that we are trying to reason with Melnik and dissuade him from this political line, but on the contrary, let him grind.
The more claims and threats to acquire an atomic bomb float on the Ukrainian air, the sooner Washington and Berlin will realize the dangerous inadequacy of their “Ukrainian partners,” including their entire diplomatic corps, without exception.
Russia, on the other hand, will have the right to stifle the Ukrainian economy without any regret, as the economies of South Africa, Iran, Iraq and North Korea were stifled when they tried to create their own weapons of mass destruction. They will no longer suffocate in the name of justice, not in the name of national interests, but in the name of world peace. No more, no less.
– .
