Ukraine Betrayed

This is copy-and-pasted, an article by Anthony Scaramucci entitled "The Promise We Made in Budapest."

In December 1994, the United States made a promise. Ukraine had inherited the third-largest nuclear arsenal on earth when the Soviet Union collapsed, and it agreed to give every warhead away. In exchange, the Budapest Memorandum committed the United States, Russia, and Britain to respect Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty, and existing borders, and to refrain from threatening or using force against it. Ukraine kept its end of the bargain. Russia shredded its end in 2014 and again in 2022. And now an American president treats our end as if it never existed.

 

Look at what happened just this month. In Miami, American envoys floated expanded security guarantees that Ukraine’s team welcomed, and then the talks collapsed after President Trump agreed to ease sanctions so Russia could import hundreds of thousands of barrels of diesel, as part of a side deal with Vladimir Putin. Even a senior EU official in the room said the move caught negotiators by surprise. Now reports say he may cut off intelligence sharing with Kyiv.

 

Budapest was the bedrock of a bargain America has sold the world for thirty years: give up the bomb, and the great powers will respect your sovereignty. When the president walks away from that bargain to do Putin a favor, he is telling us whose side he instinctively takes when a dictator and a democracy collide.

 

Ask why. Vladimir Putin is the world’s leading practitioner of slowly dismantling a free society. He jailed and poisoned his opponents, crushed the independent press, turned the courts into instruments of the Kremlin, and rewrote the constitution to rule indefinitely. This is the man Donald Trump called a “genius” on the eve of the full-scale invasion. Admiration is not yet policy. But it is a preview, and we no longer have to guess what the preview looks like.

 

The deeper tell is how he treats promises, and the record at home already shows that. In September 2025, he publicly demanded on Truth Social that his attorney general prosecute James Comey, Adam Schiff, and Letitia James. The career U.S. attorney who doubted the cases was pushed out and replaced by Trump’s former personal lawyer, a woman with no prosecutorial experience, who secured indictments of Comey and James within weeks. A federal judge threw both cases out because she had been unlawfully appointed. Days after his inauguration, he fired seventeen inspectors general, the independent watchdogs that root out fraud, by two-sentence email, and a federal judge later called it “obvious” that he broke the law. A man who treats the nation’s word abroad as disposable treats the rules that protect you at home the same way.

The pattern runs straight through the First Amendment and into our streets. His FCC chairman threatened broadcasters’ licenses over their coverage of the Iran war, and the president cheered him on. He federalized the National Guard and sent troops into Democratic-led cities against their governors' objections, until courts, including the Supreme Court in the Chicago case, stopped him; his response was that it was only a matter of time before he sent them back. I served in that White House for eleven days, as everyone loves to remind me, and I saw how quickly the line between the country's interests and one man's grievances disappears. Our institutions are not self-executing.

They hold only because people inside them refuse to bend.

In 1994, the United States told a young democracy that it would respect its freedom if it disarmed. If this president will walk away from that promise to please Vladimir Putin, ask yourself what he would walk away from to please himself. The Bill of Rights is a promise too — that the government will not silence your speech, prosecute you for opposing it, or send soldiers into your city because your governor is from the wrong party. Defending the word we gave Ukraine and defending the freedoms we promised ourselves are the same fight. Watch what he does for Putin, because it shows you what he would like to do with his power over you.