Did the West betray Ukraine?
The story of 1994, Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons, and the diplomatic doublethink of security “assurances” from the Budapest Memorandum…
September 12, 2024
It’s January 12, 1994. President Bill Clinton has arrived in Kyiv to find his Ukrainian counterpart President Leonid Kravchuk melancholic, mired in second thoughts about signing a document that will determine Ukraine’s future for a generation. Ukraine is due to agree to full denuclearization in return for financial compensation, assistance with the weapons’ removal, and security assurances (how robust, we will come onto).
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has inherited the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal, including 1,900 strategic warheads. Washington and Moscow have formed a de-facto alliance in pressuring Kyiv to surrender these weapons, determined that only one nuclear state should emerge from the wreckage: Russia.
President Clinton stresses privately to President Kravchuk that a delay now would set back – if not destroy – the three-way process. In a not-so-subtle threat, the US warns of major damage to US-Ukraine relations, jeopardizing Ukraine’s chances of accessing much-needed Western financial aid.
The Ukrainian economy has been in freefall. A sudden transition to a market economy has led to raging hyperinflation, slumping industrial production, and a collapse in GDP of a third between 1990 and 1994.
In these circumstances, there is little real choice. A Trilateral Statement between the US, Russia, and Ukraine is signed two days later, and Ukrainian security provisions – falling substantially short of what Kyiv had hoped for – are confirmed 11 months later in a separate document, the Budapest Memorandum, on December 5, 1994. (Belarus and Kazakhstan also signed equivalent agreements under the same title.)
Today, almost 30 years on, and two-and-a-half years into Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, cities have been destroyed, families ripped apart, and countless lives lost. Despite gratitude for Western military and economic support, cries of “betrayal” have rung throughout Ukraine.
“I believe that this is a betrayal of Ukraine. I think this is a big mistake. After all, any world diplomatic agreements are ‘multiplied by zero’ from the moment the Budapest Memorandum is not observed. And no matter what we sign next, no matter what the countries agree on, there will always be a risk that someone will say it’s just a piece of paper and you don’t have to observe it.” - President Zelensky, February 2021
“We gave away the [nuclear] capability for nothing,” said Andriy Zahorodniuk, a former Defense Minister of Ukraine. Referring to the security assurances Ukraine won in exchange for its nuclear arms, he added: “Now, every time somebody offers us to sign a strip of paper, the response is, ‘Thank you very much. We already had one of those some time ago.’” - New York Times, February 2022
“28 years ago, the ill-fated Budapest Memorandum was signed. Ukraine gave up the third [largest] nuclear arsenal in the world for supposed security guarantees. But they turned out to be worthless as one of the guarantors was actually a terrorist. Never again. No more Budapest Memorandums.” - Andriry Yermak, President Zelensky’s chief of staff, December 2022
But is the story so black and white? As discussion of the need for an armistice and a new security architecture with Russia mounts, what lessons from the 1994 negotiations can be unearthed, three decades on?
1) Russian aggression was foreseeable in the early 1990s
The early 1990s was a period of heady optimism. But there were sober voices warning of inevitable Russian revanchism.
Professor John Mearsheimer has achieved fame in the last two years for predicting a Russian invasion of Ukraine in a 2014 Chicago lecture (30 million views at the time of writing). But his prescience actually extends back to 1993. Professor Mearsheimer wrote that summer in Foreign Affairs:
“President Clinton is wrong. The conventional wisdom about Ukraine’s nuclear weapons is wrong. In fact, as soon as it declared independence, Ukraine should have been quietly encouraged to fashion its own nuclear deterrent. Even now, pressing Ukraine to become a nonnuclear state is a mistake… Ukraine cannot defend itself against a nuclear-armed Russia with conventional weapons, and no state, including the United States, is going to extend to it a meaningful security guarantee. Ukrainian nuclear weapons are the only reliable deterrent to Russian aggression.”
Scarcely believable today, James Baker III, US Secretary of State until 1992 (one of many administration-leading positions he has held), went so far as to pen an article in the Los Angeles Times urging NATO leaders to “draw up a clear road map for expanding the alliance eastward to include… a democratic Russia. Otherwise, the most successful alliance in history is destined to follow the threat that created it into the dustbin of history.” Baker went on:
“It would be truly tragic to tear down the concrete wall that divided Europe only to replace it with a ‘security’ wall through [Russian] exclusion from NATO… This is why Russian eligibility for membership is key to any long-term vision for NATO and should be announced as a goal at the summit.” - James A. Baker III, December 5, 1993 [1]
2) But in hindsight, Ukraine was always likely to give up its nukes
Professor Mearsheimer’s prognosis was prophetic, but such a recommendation had become impractical by 1994. From early on, Ukraine had wanted to denuclearize, and committed itself to a nuclear-free future. The country was haunted by the legacy of Chernobyl, and in dire economic straits. Officials did moot retaining strategic weapons after Ukraine unexpectedly secured its independence (which had seemed a pipe dream as late as 1990). But this was dismissed within a day’s discussion.
The non-proliferation regime at the time was all-powerful, and the last thing Ukraine wanted was to be cast as a pariah state. It longed to be recognised as a “civilized” nation, and to join the international community in good standing.
Kyiv was also facing an economic meltdown, exacerbated by Moscow’s energy blackmail and Washington’s refusal (with its effective veto power over IMF lending decisions) to allow international purse strings to be opened without Ukraine’s disarmament. Ukraine’s nuclear inheritance was not immediately deployable, and it’s unrealistic to think Kyiv could have expended the time or capital required to tackle the engineering and operational challenges involved with taking control of its weapons.
Attila Demkó, a Hungarian security policy expert and former diplomat, said to me in interview: “Professor Mearsheimer was undoubtedly right from a balance of power and survival perspective that Ukraine should have kept its nuclear weapons, but by 1994 there was no plausible way it could have for economic and political reasons. Ukraine was a relatively poor country, barely even able to maintain its conventional army and fleet. In practicality, I don’t think it was doable.”
Ukrainian President Kuchma himself in 1994 noted that the nuclear weapons could be a liability: “Experts estimate it will cost (US) $10 billion to $30 billion a year [$21bn–$63bn inflation adjusted today] to keep nuclear weapons. It means we have to sell all our possessions to keep them.”
3) The Budapest Memorandum provided only thin assurances
In a 2014 interview for the Ukrainian weekly Dzerkalo Tyzhnia, the then US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, said: “The Budapest Memorandum was not an agreement on providing security guarantees.”
The 1994 Memorandum document was carefully crafted such that it reaffirmed existing international commitments – to renounce the threat or use of force against Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity, in accordance with the UN Charter and 1975 OSCE Helsinki Final Act.
But the only new obligation – notably absent from assurances later provided by France and China (in their own individual statements) – was a procedural commitment in article six to “consult in the event a situation arises which raises a question concerning these commitments”. The document does not specify or explain the consequences for any would-be offender.
Article six of the Memorandum
The text is imbued with ambiguity such that it could be interpreted both as a legally binding treaty (the Ukrainian Parliament had conditioned Ukraine’s accession to the non-proliferation treaty on the grounds of receiving “security guarantees formalized by signing the relevant international legal document”) and as something of a mere political instrument for its guarantors.
Signed in English, Ukrainian, and Russian, it’s startling to realize that the English version notes security “assurances”, while the Ukrainian and Russian texts contain the wording security “guarantees” (Ukrainian “гарантії безпеки” and Russian “гарантии безопасности”) – even though a precise translation for “assurances” exists in both languages.
According to Steven Pifer, US Ambassador to Ukraine 1998–2000, and who was one of the American negotiators in the room in 1994, the US made it clear “guarantees” should be understood as “assurances” in the English sense, and that this understanding was confirmed by the Ukrainian and Russian delegations. From p.17 here:
“American officials decided the assurances would have to be packaged in a document that was not legally-binding. Neither the Bush nor Clinton administrations wanted a legal treaty that would have to be submitted to the Senate for advice and consent to ratification. State Department lawyers thus took careful interest in the actual language, in order to keep the commitments of a political nature. US officials also continually used the term ‘assurances’ instead of ‘guarantees’, as the latter implied a deeper, even legally-binding commitment of the kind that the United States extended to its NATO allies.”
Pifer went on (p.23):
“English draws a distinction between ‘guarantee’ and ‘assurance’, while both words translate into ‘guarantee’ in Ukrainian and Russian. US officials read for the formal negotiating record a statement to the effect that, whenever ‘guarantee’ appeared in the Ukrainian and Russian language texts of the Trilateral Statement, it was to be understood in the sense of the English word ‘assurance’. The Ukrainian and Russian delegations confirmed that understanding.”
The nebulous term “Memorandum” was chosen to reflect the nature of the agreement.
Through the draft UN Security Council Resolution of March 15, 2014, and joint consultations held in the same year, the US and UK technically met the letter of their obligations laid out in the Budapest Memorandum.
Yet the 1994 document has, in the past 2.5 years, been depicted in Western media as a “cast-iron promise of security”. Certainly Kyiv, according to Pifer, “treated the memorandum as, in effect, an international treaty, including by publishing the document in a compendium of Ukraine’s international treaties”. But it was no such thing.
The document, in its separate translations, enshrined a form of diplomatic doublethink.
4) Ukrainian leaders knew what they were getting
“There is a good Ukrainian saying: the eyes saw what they bought,” said Oleksandr Zaitsev, Professor of Contemporary History at Ukrainian Catholic University. “Those who negotiated the Memorandum on the Ukrainian side had to realize that it does not give real security guarantees.”
Prior to signing the Memorandum, Ukrainian officials had repeatedly pushed for stronger guarantees (including drafting a treaty in June 1993), but the US shot such attempts down – unambiguously.
According to Professor Paul D’Anieri, in the introduction to Ukraine’s Nuclear Disarmament: A History, “Virtually every US source, then and now, says that NATO membership or a treaty committing the US to defending Ukraine were not on the table. Indeed, at this time, the Clinton administration was still a year away from announcing its support for enlarging NATO to include Czechia, Hungary, and Poland.”
And Yuriy Kostenko, who was one of Ukraine’s then-delegates active in denuclearization talks: “From the mentality of the [Ukrainian] government at the time, talking about NATO membership in the Rada was like pouring petrol on and burning yourself. For them, NATO was something terrible.”
Steven Pifer went further, telling me in interview that even if Washington and Kyiv had been granted a crystal ball in 1994 which showed events of 2014 and 2022 playing out, firm treaty guarantees “would have been very hard to get through the Senate”, and the whole nuclear disarmament deal would likely have fallen apart.
Ukraine’s leaders went on to sign the document simply because they ran out of time. Ukraine’s economy was near collapse, and its leaders realized they could not afford to draw talks out for much longer. The agreement was the best they could achieve at the time, given their weak negotiating hand.
Seeing denuclearization as a necessary first step to establishing good relations with the West (as well as to avoid antagonizing Russia), Ukraine opted to kick the security can down the road, sorting out its then immediately existential economic crisis.
Nikolai Sokov, a former diplomat at the Soviet Union/Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1987–1992), observed “To a large extent, the Budapest Memorandum was intended mostly for the Rada [the Ukrainian Parliament], not so much for the Ukrainian government” and that the semantics of a security “guarantee” were needed to sell nuclear disarmament to a suspicious Ukrainian assembly.
General Igor Smeshko, director of the Centre for Strategic Planning and Analysis in Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council: “We knew, even in those naïve days, that no one would fight for us.”
5) There is a disconnect to this day between US and Ukrainian officials
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the US understandably became obsessed with “the nuclear problem” – terrified weapons would disappear into sinister hands, and that the world would end up with a “Yugoslavia with nukes”. But American officials failed to appreciate Kyiv’s desire to use its inherited nuclear arsenal as a meaningful bargaining chip in return for a legitimate security guarantee. In addition, Ukraine wished – through a claim of “ownership” of nuclear weapons on its territory – to be recognized as a successor state of the Soviet Union on a par with Russia. Instead, Ukraine was tarred as “the nuclear bogeyman of the new world order and a nationalistic state (in the pejorative sense) engaging in nuclear blackmail”.
Steven Pifer confirmed to me that when negotiating the Trilateral Statement and Budapest Memorandum, Ukrainian officials asked their American counterparts how Washington would respond if Russia violated the Memorandum’s terms. US officials replied that the United States would take an interest and act – though, crucially, this would not include sending US forces to Ukraine’s defense. Today, with Congress having approved $175 billion (and counting) since February 2022 to aid Ukraine’s defense, Washington considers it has more than fulfilled the spirit of the 1994 Memorandum, and that Kyiv should be grateful. Yet, while American politicians focus on their efforts, Ukrainians – understandably – point to the outcome: myriad Ukrainian lives lost, millions more displaced, reconstruction costs at present estimates of $486 billion (three times Ukraine’s GDP), and a loss of close to 20% of the country’s territory.
The disconnect between effort and outcome has given rise to a betrayal narrative, denigrating the 1994 Memorandum as “just a piece of paper nobody really wanted to observe”.
6) Russia, meanwhile, brazenly violates the Memorandum
Russia does not talk about the 1994 agreement much. Alluding to it only when fending off questions from Western press, Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s Foreign Minister, has always denied violating the Memorandum. Most egregiously, Lavrov misstated the substance of the Memorandum, falsely insisting it “contains only one obligation, not to use nuclear arms against Ukraine”.
Moscow also claims the agreement does not oblige it to recognize (what it regards as) the illegal and anti-constitutional coup of 2014, staged with the connivance of the West. Russia argues that “the Crimean people exercised their legal right to self-determination” and (even more unabashedly) that they joined the Russian Federation in full compliance with the UN Charter.
Russia argues the West violated Ukraine’s sovereignty first – by imposing sanctions towards 2014 Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his associates, and then later supporting a coup through its recognition of Ukraine’s newly installed government.
Article three of the Memorandum reads: “[signatory countries will] refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind”. In 2013, Belarus (the Memorandum also covered Belarus and Kazakhstan) formally complained that American sanctions imposed on them violated the agreement. But the US fudged the issue, with its Embassy in Minsk saying (despite undoubted economic pressure), these were “aimed at securing the human rights of Belarusians... not at gaining any advantage for the United States”, while reiterating “the Memorandum is not legally binding”.
Though as Stephan Jensen, country director for Ukraine at the Tony Blair Institute, pointed out in a conversation with me (speaking in a personal capacity): “If you look at how Putin is justifying the war today, above all, he hammers home his belief that Ukraine is fundamentally a part of Russia, and Russian media often talks about a ‘civil war’. All of this is a contravention of the spirit of the Budapest Memorandum. The whole point of it was: we [the US and Russia] will take your nuclear weapons, but we will accept that you are a sovereign and independent country.”
7) From 1994, America has to shoulder some blame
Decision-makers in the West might take a page from Solzhenitsyn, who emphasized the importance of personal responsibility and self-reflection in understanding one’s own suffering and tragedy.
Robert McConnell, co-founder of the US-Ukraine Foundation, claimed in a February 2021 livestream that, since the early 1990s:
“Moscow saw how… we [the US] did not treat Ukraine the way we should have treated it as an independent country. That has permeated everything the Kremlin has done since. The only time that I know of that the Budapest Memorandum meant anything was late in the 1990s when the Russians went on military maneuvers that included going into Crimea. Our Ambassador at the time – and I wish he had written all this down – called President Clinton and said, ‘this is against the Budapest Memorandum’ – and Clinton called Yeltsin and the troops were removed. We haven’t had any such dialogue or pushback since. And I think that owes to the way we treated Ukraine. We’re now starting maybe to treat Ukraine like a full international nation, but we sure didn’t then, and that’s what I think set the stage for the ongoing Kremlin aggression that we see and have seen ever since.”
With President Yanukovych’s election win in February 2010, American policy towards Ukraine became concerned with ensuring Kyiv transferred its remaining holdings of enriched uranium to Russia for reprocessing.
Following Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, the US made clear that Russia’s actions violated Ukraine’s sovereignty and the agreed standards of international behavior. But its weak overall response signaled the limits of its support for Kyiv, and demonstrated that the White House – amidst all its other foreign policy priorities – simply did not care enough. Aware that President Obama’s primary concerns were the Iran nuclear deal, the war in Syria, and rise of ISIS, Moscow capitalized on Washington’s need for support in other theaters.
As Dr. Mariana Budjeryn, senior research associate at Harvard’s Belfer Center and author of Inheriting the Bomb (detailing Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament [2]), pointed out to me: “There is a signature of a US President under the Budapest Memorandum document. It’s not a trifling thing to get a US President to sign anything.” Jensen reinforced this sentiment: “The fact that you have big powers at the time – the US, Russia and Britain – saying ‘these are the borders’ ought to have been reassuring. The spirit of the agreement was: we will give away our nuclear weapons, our deterrent, because we will be safe.” Professor D’Anieri echoes this: “While the guarantees were thin, the legitimacy they conveyed was immensely valuable at a time when many still questioned Ukraine’s statehood.”
But in a remarkable 2023 interview, former President Bill Clinton expressed his sense of personal guilt: “I feel terrible about it… I feel a personal stake because I got them [Ukraine] to agree to give up their nuclear weapons. And none of them believe that Russia would have pulled this stunt if Ukraine still had their weapons.”
8) Ukraine must shoulder some blame too
Ukraine did not build on the 1994 Budapest Memorandum to establish more robust security ties with the West during its relatively favorable period with the Clinton administration, before relations began to sour in 1999. Rather, it “shelved” the agreement until 2014 and fell into a state of complacency.
Former Ukrainian President Kuchma said in September 2014: “In 1994, when I signed the Budapest agreement, the United States, Great Britain, and then also China guaranteed security for us. It seemed to me that we were going to live in God’s bosom. We don’t need an army.”
It’s fascinating looking back, as I have in researching this piece the past several months, that there is scarcely any mention of the agreement anywhere in the intervening years – and that the Budapest Memorandum has only been revived into public consciousness since the 2014 annexation of Crimea.
Dr. Budjeryn explains: “As with any international political document, you have to make something out of it”. In conversation with me, Dr. Budjeryn pointed to Ukraine’s relative diplomatic naïvety and inexperience to explain its failure to grasp “the US is a global hegemon, has many things to juggle, many regions and allies, and one can’t expect some kind of automaticity in these matters”. Ukrainians shouldn’t have expected a stalwart security architecture to transpire wholly by virtue of their having a signed piece of paper.
Dr. Budjeryn explained that Ukraine did indeed try to make use of the Budapest agreement after 2014, but became disillusioned after an initial lackluster response from the West. “When Ukraine itself then denigrates it as a piece of worthless paper, then of course other signatories will not honor it. Ukrainians did themselves a disfavor in their 2014 reaction.” Budjeryn continued, “What Ukraine should have said is, ‘This is a very important political document, the US President has put his signature to it, it’s part and parcel of the broader non-proliferation regime, and we Ukraine think it’s very important’.”
Prior to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, Ukraine was deeply divided both among its elites and wider population regarding its desired geopolitical identity. Unwilling to countenance the real possibility of Russian aggression, the country was taken by surprise in Crimea. Though President Poroshenko then made military investments from 2014–2019, President Zelensky remained skeptical about the reality of a Russian attack as late as the eve of the 2022 invasion.
Prioritizing the country’s economy in favor of its security was most keenly demonstrated by Ukraine’s interest in joining the EU, having witnessed the booming economies of former Eastern Bloc states after their own accession, and its reluctance – at least prior to 2014 – to wean itself off a Russian energy dependence (along with many other European countries).
Failures of 1994 could have long-term consequences for the future of non-proliferation agreements
The long-term failure of the 1994 Memorandum could have untold consequences. Weak security “assurances” have been exposed for what they are, and it could be argued that the 1994 agreement being precedent-setting for nuclear disarmament may in fact be the single best argument for continued Western support for Ukraine, not to encourage nuclear proliferation to every mid-tier power that wishes to protect itself. Having observed events in Libya, how might the after-effects of Ukraine’s denuclearization be perceived by leaders today in North Korea, Pakistan and Iran?
Strategically important countries must not be left in a security gray-zone, and as the global balance of power shifts, security guarantees may again need to become more explicit. As the 1953 example of South Korea has shown, this is possible to do short of NATO membership.
Ukrainian political analyst Igor Mydonuk wrote in 2014: “Our ‘guarantors of security’, particularly the US and Great Britain, betrayed their alliance commitments, putting the entire world on the edge of the necessity for total nuclear armament. After the annexation of Crimea, absolutely all global agreements on security that the United States promised to all countries, including Israel, Japan, Taiwan, and eventually all NATO members, especially the Baltic States, can be regarded as waste paper.” This is extreme (neither the US nor the UK had any actual alliance commitment towards Ukraine), but does it hint towards a kernel of truth?
According to former Ukrainian President Kuchma, while visiting Paris shortly after signing the Budapest Memorandum, the then French President François Mitterrand warned him: “Don’t believe them. They [the signatory powers] will deceive you.”
Relying on unclear assurances and the goodwill of great powers should be dissatisfying to countries concerned about their security – especially the direct neighbors of hostile states.
The Budapest Memorandum was not primarily about giving Ukraine a security guarantee, but getting Ukraine to denuclearize as part of the broader non-proliferation agenda – a remarkable decades-long US-led achievement. Ukraine-supporting Western media today should not retrospectively try to distort this.
But the 1994 agreement was the product of a fundamentally different time, America triumphant in its unipolar moment, and widespread expectations of the End of History. We’re now in a different moment, and “assurances” are no longer enough. Wherever ceasefire lines ultimately get drawn between Ukraine and Russia, it’s time to dispense with doublethink, and bring back guarantees.
Sang-Hwa Lee is a Civic Future fellow 2023–24, with an MA in Philosophy from King’s College London and a BA in History from the University of Cambridge. You can follow her on X here.
[1] James Baker III foresaw in his 1993 op-ed: “These concerns would have credence if NATO expansion were to include the Central and Eastern European states but exclude the states of the former Soviet Union. Such an ill-advised approach would not only sow the seeds for revanchism and a revived Russian empire, it would also undermine the independence of the 11 non-Russian independent states of the former Soviet Union. Perversely, it could prompt some states of Central Asia and the Caucuses to look south to places like Tehran for security.”
[2] Dr. Budjeryn explained to me that “denuclearization” has a particular connotation that implies lack of agency on Ukraine’s part, and that “these were not Ukraine’s weapons to surrender”. Even though “denuclearization” is still widely used, “nuclear disarmament” in relation to Ukraine is a more apt way to describe both Ukraine’s legitimate claim to the weapons, and its decision to surrender them.