107

new nations’ sovereignty, compensation for the nuclear

materials in the weapons, and dismantlement assistance,

including housing for displaced ofﬁcers and environmental

restoration.

Tarasuk’s three point framework became

the Kravchuk government’s negotiating position and this

strategy bore fruit immediately. On July 27, U.S. Secretary

of Defense Aspin and Ukrainian Defense Minister Morozov

signed a Nunn-Lugar memorandum of understanding

in Kiev. The United States pledged $175 million to assist

Ukraine in dismantling the SS-19 missiles.

This agreement

would go into effect when Ukraine and the United States

completed negotiations on terms for a bilateral umbrella

agreement. Those negotiations, however, had to wait until

the conclusion of a Russian-Ukrainian presidential summit

meeting, which would examine all major issues.

In early September, President Yeltsin and his senior

ministers ﬂew to Yalta for a summit meeting with President

Kravchuk. Held in a hunting lodge built for Joseph Stalin,

the meeting became known as the Massandra Summit. All

the outstanding Ukrainian-Russian issues were on the table:

the future of the nuclear forces and weapons, the Black

Sea ﬂeet, national oil and gas debts, security guarantees,

compensation for the strategic weapons and warheads, and

conversion of the nuclear materials. Ukraine owed Russia

more than $2.5 billion for oil and natural gas credits. A week

before the summit, Russia’s state-run gas ﬁrm, Gazprom,

cut gas supplies to Ukraine by 25 percent. Then, Russian

Defense Minister Gravchev declared that Gazprom would

cut off all gas to Ukraine if it did not reach agreement at the

summit. During the meeting Yeltsin proposed that Ukraine

give up its claim to the Black Sea ﬂeet and all its nuclear

warheads. In exchange, Russia would forgive up to $2.5

billion in gas and oil debts and provide compensation in

the form of nuclear fuel rods that would be manufactured

from the reprocessed nuclear materials. These fuel rods

would be used in Ukraine’s nuclear fuel plants. For its

part, Ukraine would have to ratify the START I Treaty and

Nuclear Non-Proliferation (NPT) Treaty promptly, and

transfer all nuclear warheads to Russia within 24 months.

Weakened by the economic recession, facing a bleak future

without oil and gas, and desperately short of nuclear fuel

rods, Kravchuk, Kuchma and the Ukraine government

agreed to the Russian terms and signed a series of bilateral

agreements giving up its claims to the strategic weapons,

warheads, and the Black Sea Fleet.

No sooner had the agreements been signed than

every Ukrainian leader involved in the negotiations came

under severe public criticism, a situation that caused

Defense Minister Morozov to resign immediately. In

public, Ukrainian senior government ofﬁcials rejected

the agreement. In Moscow, Russian leaders dismissed the

Ukrainian government as incompetent and untrustworthy.

One Ukrainian analyst thought the Massandra Summit was

a ﬁasco that “exposed Ukraine’s weakness, isolation and lack

of options.”

Relations between Russia and Ukraine reached

an all-time low. It was at this precise moment that United

States diplomats and defense ofﬁcials seized the opportunity

and engaged both the Ukrainian and Russian governments

so forcefully that within a few months a new international

agreement had been negotiated, signed and entered into the

ﬁrst phases of implementation.

United States engages Ukraine and

Russia

U.S. Ambassador William G. Miller arrived in Kiev in

September 1993, just as the Massandra summit ended.

A career foreign service ofﬁcer, Miller had worked on the

foreign affairs and defense subcommittees of the U.S. Senate

Foreign Relations Committee and had been staff director

of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He knew

Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar well. Prior to arriving

in Kiev, he had been briefed by State Department experts

that Ukraine was a weak, bankrupt state that would probably

fail.

Within weeks of taking up his post, Ambassador

Miller rejected that assessment and began examining the

variances between U.S.-stated policy on the issue of nuclear

forces located on the national territory of Ukraine and the

government’s statements and actions at the Massandra

summit. Miller found that the United States had never

Three points in Ukrainian

nonproliferation policy

1. Security Guarantees

2. Compensation

3. Dismantlement Assistance

108

With Courage and Persistence

seriously considered that the nuclear forces in Ukraine were

“owned” by that nation as a right of succession. Yet, Ukraine’s

president, prime minister, defense and foreign ministers, and

a majority of the parliament held this belief and were willing

to negotiate that right away, as demonstrated at the summit.

Ambassador Miller made the case that the United States

should reconsider its policy regarding these forces with

Secretary of State Warren Christopher, the State Department

and senior ofﬁcials in the National Security Council.

During the same month, President Clinton had gone

to the United Nations where he reafﬁrmed the United

States’ commitment to supporting and encouraging nuclear

nonproliferation policies. Speaking at the General Assembly,

the president declared: “I have made nonproliferation

one of our nation’s highest priorities. We intend to weave

it more deeply into the fabric of all our relations with the

world’s nations and institutions.”

The president and

his administration supported the START I Treaty, Lisbon

Protocols, NPT Treaty, START II, Chemical Weapons

Convention, the Open Skies Treaty and the Nunn-Lugar

assistance program. They also embraced the recent U.S.-

Russian negotiations on facilitating and ﬁnancing the

reprocessing of highly enriched uranium in nuclear weapons

for commercial sale to nuclear power plants. Not only did

Clinton and his senior foreign, defense and national security

teams support these broad nonproliferation measures, there

was also a consensus in Congress led by Senators Nunn and

Lugar.

The United States government developed four major

policy objectives for U.S.-Ukraine relations. First, it wanted

Ukraine’s parliament, the Rada, to ratify the START Treaty

and the Lisbon Protocols. Under consideration in the

Rada for nearly 18 months, U.S. ofﬁcials tried to persuade

Kravchuk’s government to force a vote in parliament.

Second, the U.S. wanted the Rada to ratify the NPT Treaty,

declaring that Ukraine would renounce use of nuclear

weapons and become a non-nuclear nation. Third, the U.S.

sought to transform U.S.-Ukrainian relations to deal with

a broader set of issues than just nuclear forces and arms

control treaties. Speciﬁcally, it wanted to address economic

assistance, student exchanges, defense conversion and trade.

Finally, the U.S. wanted to engage Ukraine in negotiations

for receiving Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction aid.

To this end, Ambassador James Goodby, Chief of the Safe,

Secure, Dismantlement Talks, and Gloria Duffy, his deputy,

led American delegations to Kiev for meetings in August,

October and December. Secretary of Defense Aspin had

already stated that the U.S. would provide $175 million in

Nunn-Lugar assistance to Ukraine. Now the two sides needed

to negotiate the speciﬁc terms.

In Kiev, Ambassador Goodby met with Ukraine’s

negotiators; Anton Buteyko, from the National Security

Council, Deputy Foreign Minister Boris Tarasuk and

Konstantine Hryshchenko, a ministry arms control ofﬁcial.

The Ukrainians demanded that the Americans provide new

security guarantees, construct new apartments for displaced

military ofﬁcers, carry out environmental restoration of the

missile complexes, develop plans for industrial plants to

convert the rocket fuels to commercial fuel and provide all

the standard heavy dismantlement equipment and technical

training and maintenance assistance needed to dismantle

the decommissioned missiles and bombers. Foreign

Minister Anatoliy Zlenko stated they estimated the total cost

for the projects at over $2.5 billion. Ambassador Goodby

General Vladimir A. Mikhtyuk, U.S. Ambassador William G.

Miller and Laura S.H. Holgate (l.-r.)

National Archives - Still Picture Branch