Introduction | Paul J. D’Anieri 13II. What Have Others Said?The English- language scholarly literature on Ukraine’s disarmament is limited. The memoirs of many participants touch on this process, as do various histo-ries of US- Russian relations in this period. Detailed treatments are far fewer.In post-Soviet Ukraine, officials relied upon the most accessible Western scholarship, usually published by institutes and think tanks. In 1993 the Amer-ican international relations scholar John Mearsheimer published an article in Foreign Affairstitled “The Case for a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent.” 2Ukraine cannot defend itself against a nuclear- armed Russia with convention-al 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. If the U. S. aim is to enhance stability in Europe, the case against a nuclear- armed Ukraine is unpersuasive.3Mearsheimer went on to argue that US policy was futile, because the US could not compel Ukraine to give nuclear weapons “to Russia, the state it fears most.” In this second argument, Mearsheimer turned out to be wrong, but the first argument was seized on by Kostenko and like- minded Ukrainians to support their arguments. Mearsheimer later drew considerable attention by arguing, in 2014 in the same journal, that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “the West’s fault.” 4Curiously, he does not cite coercing Ukraine to disarm to support that argument, but rather blames the expansion of NATO.Mearsheimer’s article was followed, in the same issue of Foreign Affairs, by a rejoinder by Steven E. Miller. Miller contended that, “When the costs and complications associated with nuclear acquisition are taken into account, the case for Ukrainian nuclear weapons is not compelling.” 5He argued that Ukraine’s potential “instant proliferation” would leave it without effective in-stitutional control of the weapons. He also argued that Ukraine would always be outgunned by Russia, and that, ultimately, nuclear weapons would make Ukraine less secure, not more. This essentially was the official US view. Miller argued that the factors that led nuclear weapons to add stability to the US- Soviet relationship did not apply. The argument that what is good for the “great powers” is not good for lesser ones has long irked both the states seeking to obtain nuclear weapons and those who have refrained. It is also worth noting that neither Miller nor Mearsheimer was a specialist on the post- Soviet region, let alone Ukraine. While Kostenko stresses the unpreparedness of Ukraine for independence, the dearth of US expertise on Ukraine at the time was also consequential. Scholars and the government hurried to catch up to a situation that seemed to change faster than we could understand it.Writing in the late 1990s, Iincluded a chapter on disarmament in my book Economic Interdependence in Ukrainian- Russian Relations.6This anal-ysis placed the nuclear weapons question in the context of Ukraine’s broader


14 Ukraine’s Nuclear Disarmamenteffort to establish its sovereignty and autonomy from a country that was both its biggest trade partner and its greatest security threat. From this perspective, Ukraine’s acquiescence was driven by both “push” and “pull” factors. The push was Ukraine’s economic collapse. Ukraine’s disastrous economic policies left it in a weak position with respect to Russia, on whom it depended, and with respect to the US, who held the key to significant bilateral and multilateral aid. The pull was the prospect that the US and Russia would acknowledge, through the Trilateral Statement and the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. While the guarantees were thin, the legit-imacy they conveyed was immensely valuable at a time when many still ques-tioned Ukraine’s statehood. My book concluded with an argument that still seems relevant today: the reform of Ukraine’s state institutions and economy are the keys to effectively preserving independence from Russia.Christopher Stevens provided a theoretically and empirically novel expla-nation of Ukraine’s disarmament in 2008. He argued that Ukraine’s policy was not driven by the issues of compensation and security on which Kostenko and most others have focused, but on Ukraine’s identity, and specifically on Ukrai-nians’ conception of Ukraine’s relationship with Russia. Based on analysis of Ukrainian news sources and interviews with Ukrainian policy makers, Stevens finds that the long history between Ukraine and Russia left “most Ukrainian citizens socialized not to identify Russia as a real security threat.” 7Steven Pifer worked extensively on US policy toward Ukraine and its nu-clear weapons as a foreign service officer before serving as the US ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000. His inside account of US- Ukrainian relations includes a chapter on the disarmament process, placing it in the broader con-text of US- Ukraine relations.8His detailed discussion of the internal US policy- making process is analogous to, if much less opinionated than, Kostenko’s discussion of Ukraine’s process. He acknowledges that the US may not have been sufficiently sensitive to Ukraine’s concerns, but while he argues that the process could have been smoother in this respect, he does not find that the out-come could have or should have been dramatically different. Pifer concludes: “From Ukraine’s perspective, the trilateral process produced acceptable, if not ideal, outcomes on each issue.” 9Writing, like Kostenko, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, Pifer laments that the US and EU did not do more to support Ukraine, but he maintains (along with most other observers)that the more robust security commitments that Ukraine sought in 1993–1994, were simply out of reach: “neither the Bush nor the Clinton administration was prepared to offer that kind of guarantee.” 10The most detailed scholarly analysis of Ukraine’s policy on this issue is that of Mariana Budjeryn, who includes a chapter on Ukraine (along with chap-ters on Belarus and Kazakhstan)in her PhD dissertation.11Budjeryn inquires particularly about the impact of the international norm of non- proliferation relative to coercion applied by Russia and the US, finding that the norm and coercion had complementary effects. For Ukraine to keep the weapons, she shows, would be to violate the non- proliferation norm, taking Ukraine outside the behavior of “civilized” states at the very moment it was trying to assert its status as a normal, civilized state. Rooted in constructivist international rela-tions theory, her analysis shows how “going nuclear” contradicted the predom-inant notion within Ukraine of Ukraine’s identity in the international system. She also points out that the disagreements among Ukrainian elites, which