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Ukraine needs to forget about the US guarantees in the framework of the Budapest Memorandum, according to Maxim Buzhansky, a member of Kiev’s parliament from President Volodymyr Zelensky’s party.
Earlier, Afghan media circulated footage showing people falling out of an American transport plane departing from Kabul – presumably, they were Afghans who were trying to escape by clutching to the chassis.
“I think now that we have seen how” the main allies outside NATO “are thrown out of the airplanes, even the most blissful ones can stop recalling the Budapest memorandum for some reason,” Buzhansky said on his Facebook page.
Several weeks ago, against the background of the withdrawal of the American contingent from Afghanistan, the situation in the republic sharply deteriorated: the Taliban launched an offensive on large cities.
On August 15th, it became known that Taliban control all border crossings. Later that day, gunmen announced that they had entered the presidential palace.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled, his whereabouts are unknown.
On August 16th, the spokesman for the Taliban political office Mohammad Naim said that the war that had lasted for 20 years is over and a new form of government will soon become clear.
Amid the seizure of the Afghan capital by the Taliban militants, Kabul’s international airport has become the only place from which people could flee the country to escape the deepening crisis. Earlier in the media there were reports that hundreds of people broke into the runway of the Kabul airport, trying to catch the planes from Afghanistan.
The Budapest Memorandum in 1994 was signed by Ukraine, Russia, USA, France and Great Britain. According to the document, Kiev joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and eliminated its nuclear potential, while Moscow, Washington and London guaranteed security for Ukraine.
In his speech following the developments in Afghanistan, US President Joe Biden defended the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan.
At the same time, he acknowledged that the situation in the country was developing faster than expected.
One of his main claims was that the US military should not die in a war that the Afghan military themselves refused to wage.
He blamed the political leadership of Afghanistan for giving up and fleeing, and the Afghan military for surrender to the Taliban.
“We gave them every tool they could need,” Biden said. “We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them, was the will to fight for that future. It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own forces would not.”
Kiev is likely concerned that in the scenario of a large-scale escalation in Eastern Ukraine, it would be abandoned by its key ally – Washington, similarly to how Afghanistan’s army and people were abandoned.
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