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It is 1994.
The former USSR — the Soviet Union — is no more.
It has fallen.
Ukraine finds itself with nuclear weapons.
Some 1900 of them.
It is, after Russia and the U.S., the 3rd major nuclear power.
What to do?
If Ukraine could see the future, through the impenetrable veil that separates the present from what lies ahead, they would probably hang onto those weapons for dear life.
But it cannot, and it agrees to terms of what is now known as the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.
4 countries — Russia, the U.K., Ukraine and the USA — were signatories.
Bill Clinton, then POTUS of the USA, badly wanted to achieve some agreement which would remove those 1900 nuclear warheads from the equation of relative nuclear parity between Russia and the USA.
Russia may (or may not) have meant well at the time.
We’ll never know.
But Russian leadership changed, as, in the time of Joseph in ancient Egypt, a new pharaoh arose, who knew not the Hebrews.
He enslaved the Hebrews.
