Twenty-five years ago, Ukraine gave up the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal in exchange for security assurances from the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia.
That was sealed in the Memorandum on Security Assurances in Connection with Ukraine’s Accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, known as the Budapest Memorandum, signed by the four countries on Dec. 5, 1994, in the Hungarian capital.
Twenty years later, Russia broke its commitment by annexing Ukrainian Crimea and unleashing a war in eastern Ukraine, which has killed 14,000 people since then.
While the Western countries condemned Kremlin’s aggression and imposed sanctions, many see their reaction as a weak response and even a betrayal of the 1994 commitments.
As Ukraine continues the battle to defend the nation, President Volodymyr Zelensky is preparing for another round of the Normandy peace talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, joined by the leaders of France and Germany on Dec. 9 in Paris.
But the failure of the Budapest Memorandum to ensure Ukraine’s security raises big questions about whether the nation can rely on its international partners.
No choice
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, its former republics inherited the weapons that were produced and kept on their territories during the nuclear arms race. Those included Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Along with its long-awaited independence, Ukraine acquired a stockpile of 1,900 strategic nuclear warheads, which was the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal at the time.
Determined to prevent the spread of nuclear arms, the world’s leaders, the U.S. and the UK along with Russia stepped in to persuade Ukraine and others to give up the control of weapons.
In a 2014 interview with Deutsche Welle, the first Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk said that although Ukraine kept the warheads, the operational control of them belonged to Kremlin. Kravchuk, who left office on July 19, 1994, said that maintaining the arms would be costly for a newly-established country with an empty budget.
The missiles that Ukraine had were built to attack the U.S., so keeping them would have posed threats to Washington. According to Kravchuk, Kyiv was under pressure from the West at the time. Threatened with isolation, Ukraine had no other choice but surrender the arms, Kravchuk said.
So Kyiv signed the memorandum and followed its obligation to destroy some of the warheads and transport the rest to Russia.
After Russia invaded Ukrainian territory in 2014, debate sparked again on whether the 1991 decision was the right move.
Political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko says that claims that the memorandum was a mistake are pure manipulation.
“Ukraine didn’t have a different option,” Fesenko told the Kyiv Post. “The big countries were categorical about it.”
Fesenko says that had Ukraine kept the weapons, it wouldn’t have guaranteed Russia’s respect of its borders. He says that the fact that both India and Pakistan are nuclear countries doesn’t stop them from getting involved in a number of wars with each other.
According to the political analyst, the Budapest Memorandum, to the contrary, had a positive outcome for Ukraine. First of all, the country got rid of the risks that nuclear weapons bring: the possibility that terrorists could get access to them. The second one is the enormous financial costs that Kyiv would have had to spend to maintain the arms.
What Ukraine could have done differently, however, is require greater long-term economic assistance, Fesenko says.
Under the Budapest Memorandum, a document signed by Ukraine, the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia, Kyiv gave up its arsenal of nuclear weapons – at that time the third-largest in the world. (Ukrinform)
Assurances
By signing the Budapest Memorandum, the U.S., the UK and Russia reaffirmed to respect the independence, sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine, as well as to refrain from the threat or use of force against Ukraine.
After Russia broke its commitment to the document by militarily seizing Crimea and invading the Donbas in 2014, the memorandum reappeared in the headlines. In clause four, the signatories agreed to provide assistance to Ukraine if it should become a victim of an act of aggression.
The West partially isolated Kremlin politically by excluding it from the G8 group and imposed a series of economic and visa sanctions on it. The U.S. also provided $3 billion in reform and military assistance to Ukraine.
But many saw that as a weak response that hasn’t changed Russia’s behavior.
In 2015, three US think tanks, The Brookings Institution, The Atlantic Council and The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, published a report calling on a stronger reaction from the West.
“Russia has grossly violated those commitments, which were key to Kyiv’s decision to eliminate its nuclear weapons,” the report reads. “The United States and Britain should, in response, do more to robustly support Ukraine and penalize Russia.”
The report says that if Russia is not constrained, its aggression poses further danger to the region. Meanwhile, the lack of proper support for Ukraine will set a bad precedent for other countries considering nuclear proliferation.
Fesenko believes that the West was scared to openly confront Russia because of its possession of nuclear arsenal. In addition, he says that ex-U.S. President Barak Obama, who didn’t provide Ukraine with lethal weapons, proved to be a weaker geopolitical player than Putin.
The members of the Liberate Crimea movement protest in front of the French Embassy in Ukraine on Dec. 5, 2019, in Kyiv. The date marks the 25th anniversary of the Budapest Memorandum. (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
Today the West’s support of Ukraine is somewhat even more unstable. Unlike his predecessor, U.S. President Donald Trump approved transferring lethal arms to Ukraine. However, as the impeachment inquiry discovered, Trump was requesting favors from Zelensky in return for other aid.
A fan of Putin, Trump has called for Russia’s return to the G8 group multiple times. Another Western leader, French President Emmanuel Macron very recently said that Russia is no longer an enemy. He earlier supported the reestablishment of the dialogue between Kremlin and the West.
In a Dec. 5 piece for The Brookings Institution, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer, who was part of the U.S. negotiating team on the Budapest Memorandum, urged that the U.S. should continue pressure on Russia.
Pifer says that during the Budapest negotiations, U.S. officials assured their Ukrainian counterparts that they would respond in case of a danger.
“That was part of the price it (the U.S.) paid in return for a drastic reduction in the nuclear threat to America,” Pifer writes. “The United States should keep its word.”
But history has seen numerous violations of agreements, Fesenko says, which is why when it comes to peace in Ukraine, Kyiv shouldn’t rely strongly on its international allies.
“Every country acts according to its egotistical range of interests,” he said.
