Tweet Share Share Comment Ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many politicians and commentators have rued the day, back in January 1994, when Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin pressured Ukraine to dismantle its nuclear weapons. The missiles had once been controlled by the Soviet Union but were still on the soil of the newly independent Ukrainian nation. If Ukraine had held on to those nukes, some argue, Vladimir Putin might have been deterred from annexing Crimea in 2014 or invading the whole country in 2022.
In moments of pique, even Ukraine’s current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and some of his top aides have argued that their predecessors shouldn’t have given up the nukes for that reason.
However, recently declassified documents—published Thursday by the National Security Archive, a private research group, which obtained them through a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act—reveal that the argument is nonsense.
The documents—transcripts of conversations involving Clinton, Yeltsin, and Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk, at a historic summit on broad post–Cold War relations, held in Moscow and Kyiv exactly 30 years ago—clearly reveal these facts:
• Ukraine lacked the resources to maintain the nearly 1,700 Soviet nuclear weapons on its soil, many of them on intercontinental ballistic missiles that were nearing the end of their service lives. (My own reporting from several years ago, not reflected in these documents, indicates that Moscow retained command and control over the ICBMs, though Ukrainian officers could have fired the shorter-range nuclear missiles on their soil.)
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• Kravchuk and almost all Ukrainian politicians were eager to dispose of the weapons, fearing that their nuclear cores might melt down in a manner reminiscent of the Chernobyl power-plant disaster, which had occurred in Ukraine just eight years earlier. Everyone involved—the presidents, the diplomats who spent months negotiating the precise terms, and British officials, who later signed the deal as well—viewed it as mainly a measure to promote nuclear safety and nonproliferation. The U.S. Senate had recently passed a bill—named for its sponsors, Democrat Sam Nunn and Republican Richard Lugar—to pay for the cleanup and dismantlement of nuclear weapons throughout the former Soviet Union. (The deal signed in January 1994 provided “a minimum” of $175 million to Ukraine for this purpose.) Also, the U.S. and Russia were negotiating the SALT II arms-control treaty, which would require the elimination of the SS-19 and SS-24 ICBMs inside Ukraine.
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• Finally, Yeltsin forgave Ukraine mountains of debt for oil and gas that Russia had supplied, and Clinton promised to persuade the International Monetary Fund and the G7 nations to pay Ukraine’s energy imports into the future. At a meeting with Clinton, according to a memorandum of their conversation, Kravchuk said, “When we have stabilization of our currency and private investment for Ukraine, then everyone will understand that the agreement signed by the three presidents [to remove nuclear weapons from Ukraine] was the only possible step.” At a meeting with both Clinton and Yeltsin two days later, Kravchuk said, “There is no alternative to nuclear disarmament.”
The U.S.-Russia-Ukraine accord—which one of Clinton’s top aides called “the crowning achievement of the summit”—can be looked back at as a betrayal of Kyiv in one sense. Clinton and Yeltsin did promise Ukraine “full guarantees of security, as a sign of friendship and good neighborliness.” The two leaders also reaffirmed “the obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,” including Ukraine.
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Later that year, at a conference in Budapest, the U.S., Russia, and Britain formalized those security assurances to Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan (the latter two former Soviet republics had also given up the nuclear weapons on their territory), in exchange for their signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
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Putin clearly violated this pledge when he annexed Crimea 20 years later, in 2014, and then invaded all of Ukraine eight years hence. The U.S. and Britain, while not legally obligated to come to Ukraine’s aid (other than to seek immediate assistance from the U.N. Security Council, as the Budapest Memorandum required), didn’t raise a huge stink about the incursions either. A case could be made that the relative passivity encouraged Putin to mount his all-out invasion, believing—incorrectly, it turned out—that the West would do little to stop him.
Still, it is false to contend that Ukraine would not have given up the nuclear weapons on its soil had Kravchuk or any other leader at the time known that Russia would violate its guarantee of Ukrainian borders. That pledge, though important, was more a bonus than an essential element of the accord. The nukes in Ukraine (and Belarus and Kazakhstan) were going to be removed, with the host leaders’ permission and blessing, regardless of what else was said or done.
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The Truth About Ukraine’s Decision to Give Up Its Nukes in the ’90s
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26.01.2024
Tweet Share Share Comment Ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many politicians and commentators have rued the day, back in January 1994, when Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin pressured Ukraine to dismantle its nuclear weapons. The missiles had once been controlled by the Soviet Union but were still on the soil of the newly independent Ukrainian nation. If Ukraine had held on to those nukes, some argue, Vladimir Putin might have been deterred from annexing Crimea in 2014 or invading the whole country in 2022.
In moments of pique, even Ukraine’s current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and some of his top aides have argued that their predecessors shouldn’t have given up the nukes for that reason.
However, recently declassified documents—published Thursday by the National Security Archive, a private research group, which obtained them through a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act—reveal that the argument is nonsense.
The documents—transcripts of conversations involving Clinton, Yeltsin, and Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk, at a historic summit on broad post–Cold War relations, held in Moscow and Kyiv exactly 30 years ago—clearly reveal these facts:
• Ukraine lacked the resources to maintain the nearly 1,700 Soviet nuclear weapons on its soil, many of them on intercontinental ballistic missiles that were nearing the end of their service lives. (My own........
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