The American "The Intercept" website said that breaking covenants with small countries makes them never give up their nuclear weapons.

In an article by journalist Mortada Hussein, the website indicated that the international powers promised Ukraine in the 1990s that its security would not be violated if it disarmed its nuclear weapons, but the latter broke the promise.

Ukraine - the writer adds - was once home to thousands of nuclear weapons that it inherited from the former Soviet Union and the third nuclear power in the world when it gained its independence after the end of the Cold War.

In the early 1990s, the Ukrainian leadership made what appears today as a "fatal decision" when it renounced these "terrifying" weapons in exchange for guarantees signed by the international community to protect its security in the future.

Today, that appears to have been a poor decision after Ukraine was overrun by heavily armed "invasive" Russian forces, with little prospect of its former friends abroad coming to its defense.

In his article, Murtada believes that "the tragedy that is now unfolding in Ukraine confirms a broader principle that is clearly visible throughout the world, which is that countries that sacrifice their nuclear deterrence capabilities in exchange for well-intentioned promises from the international community often write their death certificates themselves."

In a world teeming with weapons, with its potential for the end of human civilization, limiting the spread of nuclear weapons - the writer adds - becomes in and of itself a worthwhile moral effort and even an inescapable end.

However, the experiences of countries that have actually denuclearized their nuclear weapons may make many countries decide not to do so in the future.

Perhaps what the writer calls the "betrayal of the Ukrainians" - in particular - is something that cannot be underestimated.

In 1994, the government in Kyiv signed a memorandum entering the country into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, relinquishing its status as a nuclear state, and since then the territorial integrity of Ukraine has not been much respected.

Once Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea peninsula in 2014, Ukrainian leaders began to consider the merits of the treaty they had concluded just two decades earlier.

They seem to feel bitter about it today.

The writer goes on to say that the Ukrainians were not the only ones who regretted giving up their nuclear weapons.

In 2003, the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi did the same, when he suddenly announced that his country would give up its nuclear program and chemical weapons in exchange for normalizing relations with the West.


Libya and Iran

Although sanctions were lifted on Libya and relations with Washington were restored, Gaddafi discovered - during the Arab Spring revolutions in 2011 - that what appeared to be his "economic partners and diplomatic allies" were the ones who were suddenly providing "critical" military aid to his opponents, so that they They cheered his death.

Another example is Iran, which concluded a comprehensive nuclear agreement with the United States in 2015 to limit its ability to make a potential breakthrough in the manufacture of nuclear weapons, and subject its civilian nuclear program to extensive oversight.

Soon, the administration of former US President Donald Trump violated the agreement in 2018, despite Tehran's continued commitment to it - as the author of the article sees it - and strict international sanctions were imposed on it.

In contrast, to this day, a nuclear state has not been subjected to a large-scale invasion by a foreign power, whatever its actions. North Korea, for example, has managed to keep its "hermetic" political system intact for decades despite the tensions in its relations with the international community.