Ukraine’s Nuclear Disarmament
the Lisbon Protocol opened doors for us to pursue an independent nuclear
policy and negotiate directly with the US, thus bypassing Russia, the tradi-
tional intermediary. Ukraine could take advantage of the divergent interests
and competition between Russia and the US, which would allow us to advance
Ukr
aine’s own national interests.
Therefore, it appears that the signing of the Lisbon Protocol on 23May
1992 activated a new phase
in nuclear disarmament, in which advantage would
accrue to the parties most able to take advantage of the opportunities provided
by the document. It must be said that both Russia and the US began taking
advantage of these opportunities before the Protocol’s execution in Lisbon.
Since the goals of both involved the complete disarmament of the three nuclear
republics, but START only mandated the aforementioned 36 and 42 percent, it
was extremely important for them to find other legal avenues to force Ukraine,
Belarus, and Kazakhstan to commit to complete disarmament within the next
seven years.
On 7May 1992, two weeks before the Lisbon summit, Leonid Kravchuk
unexpectedly wrote a letter to George H. W. Bush in which he jumped the gun
by committing Ukraine to actions not sanctioned by Parliament, including to
reduce not a portion, but all of Ukraine’s nuclear weapons within a seven- year
period. As already mentioned, Parliament had the exclusive right to dispose
of state property on behalf of its people. Therefore, Kravchuk’s actions could
be seen either as overstepping the bounds of his authority or as a relapse to
Soviet practices, when the general secretary of the Communist Party would
make a decision and everyone would automatically support it post factum.
In the letter, Kravchuk referred to the time schedule delineated in the
START (although Ukraine was not yet party to it)and for some reason to Par
-
liament’s Statement on the Nonnuclear Status of Ukraine, which did not specify
any time limits. On virtually the same day as President Kravchuk in Ukraine,
the
presidents of Kazakhstan and Belarus wrote analogous letters to the US
president. The essential congruence of the commitments offered in these let
-
ters, along with their contradiction to the text of the Lisbon Protocol and the
f
act that they were most advantageous only to Russia, suggests that the letters
had common authorship. This also points to the influence Moscow still had on
the former republics’ foreign ministries and presidents.
As I already mentioned, two important details went unnoticed by the
Ukrainian MFA in the five brief articles of the Lisbon Protocol. Article II re
-
quired eliminating not only the nuclear warheads, but also the strategic de-
livery systems. For the USSR and the US, manufacturers of both the nuclear
weapons and their deliver
y mechanisms, the demolition of a strategic deliver
y
system, a mechanism of delivering a nuclear warhead to its target, automat
-
ically meant the reduction in the number of nuclear warheads with target-
striking capability. This was the essence of STARTI, signed by the USSR and
the US in July 1991, which aimed at reducing the potential confrontation levels
between the two countries. Its implementation was to be assured by tallying
the decommissioned strategic delivery systems only, and not the destroyed
nuclear warheads.
The USSR and the US had selected this approach because the experts who
were working on the development of STARTI implementation mechanisms
could not reach a compromise on the issue of how to control the demolition of
the warheads themselves. Ultimately, after a nuclear warhead was dismantled,
the HEU and the plutonium removed from it could be reused in a new warhead.
Chapter 1. An Infant in a Grownups’ Game
The USSR’s collapse had fundamentally changed the situation
around the implementation of STARTI. Since Ukraine, like Belar-
us and Kazakhstan, was not producing its own nuclear warheads,
the
path to
nuclear disarmament rested in the elimination of the
nuclear warheads themselves, rather than in the demolition of
nuclear warheads’ delivery mechanisms. This fundamentally new
circumstance was supposed to be taken into account by the MFA
in the course of the Lisbon Protocol’s execution.
The second time bomb inserted into the text of the Lisbon
Protocol by the US and Russia, which likewise went unnoticed by
Ukraine’s MFA, was Article V. It emerged unexpectedly and im
-
mediately before the Protocol’s signing. According to the article,
notwithstanding the fact that Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine
were to become parties
to STARTI and obligated to eliminate
nuclear weapons in place of the USSR, the three countries were
to accede to the NPT as nonnuclear- weapon states within the
shortest possible time.
This combination of terms was completely unlawful and
showed signs of diplomatic machinations. The Academy of Sci
-
ences Institute of Government and Law unequivocally concluded
t
hi
s in its analysis of the Lisbon Protocol, published in the article
entitled “Ukraine’s Nuclear Status: Legal and Political Issues.”
First, it wrote, “insisting on Ukraine’s ratification of STARTI fun
-
damentally constitutes the country’s recognition as a successor
to the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons, including the right of
ownership of
the portion of nuclear weapons that are located on
its territory.” This, emphasized the legal experts, “constitutes an
indirect recognition of Ukraine’s clear nuclear status; otherwise
it simply cannot become party to this agreement.”
74
In contrast, demanding that Ukraine join the NPT as a non-
nuclear state completely invalidated this right, as it was only
possible in two instances: either the non-
recognition of Ukraine’s
succession with regard to international treaties or the non-
recognition of Ukraine’s succession with regard to property locat
-
ed on its territory, which “unequivocally violates Ukraine’s suc-
cession rights with respect to the former USSR.” The Institute’s
experts stressed that Ukr
aine’s status “is not provided in the
T
reaty [NPT],” because the Treaty defined a nuclear- weapon state
only as one that has independently manufactured and tested a
nuclear explosive device. The Treaty’s language also did not pro
-
vide for instances in which a nuclear-
weapon state disintegrated,
creating several new states that now possessed its predecessor’s
nuclear weapons. Therefore, “Ukraine can only join the NPT on
the basis of this special status, as a temporary nuclear- weapon
state,” and this, they concluded, required amending the Treaty to
reflect the status Ukraine had at that time, while a “straightfor
-
ward accession to the NPT, without the corresponding amend-
ments, will be legally insolvent and fundamentally fruitless.”
75
The simultaneous ratification of both treaties, the NPT and
the START, along with the Lisbon Protocol, resulted in a diplo-
matic Catch
-22, automatically depriving Ukraine of its legal right
23. Signatures of the parties to the
Lisbon Protocol
