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Department’s lawyers. British Foreign Office lawyers
concurred in State’s legal view. e Russians, how-
ever, had less flexible legal advisors. Russian Foreign
Ministry officials told the U.S. embassy in Moscow
that they found the Rada resolution unacceptable;
it did not meet their requirement for Ukraine to ac-
cede to the NPT as a non-nuclear weapons state. It
thus would not suffice to allow START I entry into
force or extension of security assurances to Ukraine.
On November 17, the Russian Foreign Ministry is-
sued a statement addressing the Rada vote:
“Moscow appreciates the Ukrainian leader-
ship’s efforts to resolve the issue of Ukraine’s
accession to the Nonproliferation Treaty of
July 1, 1968. In this connection, we were
satisfied to hear the news that the Supreme
Soviet of Ukraine [the Rada] yesterday
passed a law on accession to this treaty. At
the same time, we cannot ignore the fact
that the adopted law stipulated some con-
ditions. e content of these terms makes
unclear the status—nuclear or non-nucle-
ar—in which Ukraine is planning to join
the NPT… ese questions must be an-
swered because the NPT depositaries are
now completing the drafting of a document
on security guarantees [assurances] for
Ukraine, which are planned to be given to
it as a state not possessing nuclear weapons.
e importance of clarifying these issues is
quite understandable.”
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In Washington, the White House took a more posi-
tive line, issuing a November 17 press statement
welcoming the Rada vote and noting that it cleared
the way for Ukraine to accede to the NPT as a non-
nuclear weapons state. e statement concluded by
noting that Ukraine’s accession to the NPT opened
a new period of expanded U.S.-Ukrainian coop-
eration and commended Kuchma for his efforts to
achieve a successful Rada vote.
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State Department officials meanwhile weighed how
to deal with the obstacle posed by the Rada lan-
guage and the Russian rejection of it. Asking the
Rada to vote a new resolution, as Russian officials
suggested, was clearly a non-starter. No one in the
U.S. embassy in Kyiv or the State Department saw
any chance that the Rada would take up the question
again. e problem boiled down to finding a way to
“clarify” the Rada’s ambiguous language so that it
satisfied the Russian demand for an unambiguous
statement that Ukraine was acceding to the NPT as
a non-nuclear weapons state. e problem became
more complicated when Ukrainian officials advised
that the Rada’s resolution of ratification would have
to be transmitted to the U.S., Russian and British
governments as part of Ukraine’s instrument of ac-
cession to the NPT.
Kuchma’s visit to Washington proved successful,
covering a wide range of issues on the bilateral
agenda. e two presidents signed a “Charter on
American-Ukrainian Partnership, Friendship and
Cooperation” and reached a number of other agree-
ments. Clinton announced that the United States
would provide $200 million in assistance in Fiscal
Year 1995, and the presidents agreed to cooperate to
close Chornobyl. e sides agreed on the Budapest
venue, and the joint statement of the two presidents
noted that they looked “forward to early entry into
force of the START I Treaty and agreed that the
Lisbon Protocol signatories should exchange instru-
ments of ratification on the margins of the Budapest
CSCE summit.”
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In the meantime, U.S. officials hit on a possible so-
lution to the problem posed by the Rada’s resolution
of accession to the NPT: have the Ukrainian govern-
ment “clarify” the resolution. U.S. officials suggested
to the Ukrainians that, when Kuchma transferred
the resolution of ratification to Clinton, Yeltsin and
British Prime Minister John Major in Budapest, he
hand it over under cover of a diplomatic note stating
that Ukraine acceded to the NPT as a non-nuclear
weapons state.
is proposal satisfied the Russians in principle,
and the Ukrainians were amenable to the approach,
though working out the precise language for the
diplomatic note went down to the wire. With lead-
ers planning to gather in Budapest on December 5,
discussions between the U.S. embassy in Kyiv and
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Ukrainian officials failed to come to terms on De-
cember 3. Christopher met with Kozyrev late the
evening of December 4 in Budapest; the Russian
foreign minister essentially gave the Americans a
Russian proxy to work out the final language with
the Ukrainian side. U.S. officials followed up with
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Gennadiy Udovenko,
Hryshchenko and the Ukrainian team into the early
hours of December 5. ey finally reached agree-
ment on the language for the diplomatic note just
hours before the signing ceremony.
In a carefully orchestrated ceremony later that morn-
ing, Kuchma passed to Clinton, Yeltsin and Major
the Rada’s instrument of accession to the NPT, cov-
ered by the agreed diplomatic note making clear that
Ukraine joined the treaty as a non-nuclear weapons
state. e four leaders then signed the Budapest
Memorandum of Security Assurances for Ukraine,
following which Clinton, Kuchma, Yeltsin, Naz-
arbayev and Lukashenko exchanged the documents
to bring the START I Treaty into force.
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For Clin-
ton, the ceremony was the only positive event in an
otherwise difficult visit to the Hungarian capital that
featured a public Yeltsin blast against the prospect of
NATO enlargement.
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e Budapest memorandum provided security as-
surances packaged in a way that was politically use-
ful for Kyiv, bolstering its standing vis-à-vis Mos-
cow. e document also created a mechanism to
which Ukraine could resort were there any questions
about fulfillment of the memorandum’s assurances.
France and China separately extended parallel secu-
rity assurances to Ukraine, meaning that the newly
independent state had assurances from all five per-
manent members of the UN Security Council. e
political importance that Ukraine attached to the
memorandum and assurances was evident by the
fact that Kyiv treated the memorandum as, in effect,
an international treaty, including by publishing the
document in a compendium of Ukraine’s interna-
tional treaties.
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FolloW-Up
For all the challenges of completing the Trilateral
Statement and Budapest Memorandum, implemen-
tation proceeded in a remarkably smooth fashion.
Beginning in early 1994, trains carrying warheads
removed from SS-19 and SS-24 ICBMs and Kh-
55 ALCMs regularly departed Ukraine for Russia,
where the weapons were delivered to a dismantle-
ment facility. In return, the Russians made regular
shipments of assembled fuel rods for use in Ukrai-
nian nuclear power plants. e Ukrainian and Rus-
sian governments kept Washington informed on the
progress in meeting the schedules for warhead and
fuel rod shipments. ere were some brief delays,
but no major hitches. A last-minute problem in May
1996 over debt write-off to compensate Ukraine for
the HEU from tactical nuclear weapons threatened
to stop the final warhead transfers, but Kyiv and
Moscow worked it out.
e last two trains carrying nuclear warheads de-
parted Ukraine on May 31, so that all nuclear war-
heads had been transferred by the June 1, 1996
deadline. With significant Nunn-Lugar assistance
from the United States, Ukraine removed the SS-19s
and SS-24s from their silos, destroyed the silos, and
chopped up its Blackjack and Bear-H bombers.
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In
October 2001, the last SS-24 silo in Ukraine was de-
stroyed, eliminating the final START I-accountable
strategic nuclear delivery vehicle on its territory.
