Thirty years ago, leaders of the United States, Britain, Russia and Ukraine met in Budapest, Hungary, and signed a memorandum that provided security assurances to Ukraine in exchange for it giving up its nuclear arsenal, then the world's third largest.
Today, nearly three years after Moscow launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian officials are calling the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances "a monument to short-sightedness in strategic security decision-making" and seek NATO membership for their country.
Presidents Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine, Boris Yeltsin of Russia and Bill Clinton of the U.S., along with British Prime Minister John Major, signed the memorandum on December 5, 1994.
Steven Pifer, a veteran diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000, helped negotiate the memorandum.
"In that document, basically, the United States, Britain and Russia committed to respect Ukraine's sovereignty, independence and existing borders, and committed not to use force or threaten to use force against Ukraine,” Pifer told VOA’s Ukrainian Service.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine inherited the world`s third-largest nuclear arsenal and agreed to transfer all the nuclear munitions on its territory to Russia for dismantlement, and to decommission nuclear missile launch silos.
All parties to the memorandum agreed to "refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of the signatories to the memorandum."
However, in 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and fueled a separatist movement in eastern Ukraine. In February 2022, it launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
In a December 3 statement marking the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry called the agreement "a monument to short-sightedness in strategic security decision-making."
Clutching a copy of the memorandum after arriving in Brussels for a meeting of NATO foreign ministers, Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Minister Andrii Sybiha called the pact a reminder that any long-term decisions made at the cost of Ukrainian security are “inappropriate and unacceptable.”
“This document, this paper, failed to secure Ukrainian security and transatlantic security,” Sybiha said. “So, we must avoid repeating such mistakes. That's, of course, why we will discuss with my partners the concept of peace through strength, and we have a clear understanding which steps we need from our friends."
In its December 3 statement, Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said, “The only real guarantee of security for Ukraine, as well as a deterrent to further Russian aggression against Ukraine and other states, is Ukraine's full membership in NATO.”
That view was echoed by former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, now an opposition leader, in an interview with VOA.
"Please consider the signature on [an] invitation to [join] NATO as a continuing obligation of our partners, including the United States, on the Budapest Memorandum,” Poroshenko said.
“This is the precondition when Ukraine voluntarily gives up the third-biggest nuclear arsenal in the world, and everybody said that if Ukraine now [had] this nuclear arsenal, there would be no war and no occupation,” he told VOA.
Russian officials accuse Ukraine and its partners of having violated the Budapest Memorandum by expanding NATO — which, they say, threatens Russia’s security interests.
Pifer recalled that in the early 1990s, Ukrainian officials asked what the U.S. would do if Russia violated the Budapest Memorandum.
"We said the United States will do things; we will take an interest,” Pifer told VOA. “However, we were clear: We said, ‘We’re telling you now — that does not mean we'll send American military force to defend Ukraine.’ That's why the document is the memorandum on security assurances, not security guarantees."
Mariana Budjeryn, an author and senior research associate with the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center, believes that Ukraine and its Western partners failed to fully recognize the Russian threat. Those were different times, she said.
"There was this narrative that Ukraine is a peaceful country and it's not really threatening anyone, and it was to join the international community on good terms,” she told VOA. “The Cold War was over, the Soviet Union fell apart, and the whole issue of weapons, including nuclear weapons, became passé, became a thing of the past."
After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Pifer and others called on the Obama administration to provide defense assistance to Ukraine to fulfill its obligations under the Budapest Memorandum.
"I thought the Obama administration should have done more in terms of providing defense assistance to Ukraine,” Pifer said. “But if you look at the last two and a half years, the Biden administration has provided well over a hundred billion dollars in military and financial assistance to Ukraine. That's certainly consistent with what we were saying 30 years ago."
Budjeryn noted that the nuclear weapons Ukraine inherited in 1991 did not amount to a “fully fledged nuclear deterrent that it could just grab and use to deter Russia.”
“It was a chunk of a nuclear arsenal developed by a different country, the Soviet Union, for the strategic purposes of that country. And the strategic kind of aim of the Soviet Union was to deter NATO and the United States,” she said.
“But ultimately, to have a credible nuclear deterrent, Ukraine would have needed to invest a lot more into an independent nuclear program, which it did not have,” Budjeryn said.
Budjeryn said Ukraine could have invested more in its conventional military capabilities after it signed the memorandum. In the end, “the main lesson for any country is that no single document, no matter how legally binding or well written and robust, is a sufficient basis for national security. You have to be able to really invest in your own defense and national security," she said.
The Budapest Memorandum is not the only document Russia signed and violated, which raises questions about future agreements with Moscow, Pifer said: "It was also in the 1997 Russian-Ukrainian Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Peace. It was several other documents where the Russian government clearly said, ‘We recognize Ukraine in the borders of 1991. We will recognize and accept Ukrainian sovereignty and independence.’"
According to Budjeryn, there is a larger lesson for the global community.
"It's a story about just how fragile our system of international law — of international agreements — is, and that its credibility, its existence, a continued existence, and its workings are as much dependent on states observing voluntarily, but also on states reacting adequately and sufficiently to violations," she said.
