Thirty years ago, the leaders of the US, Britain, Russia and Ukraine met in Budapest, Hungary, and signed a memorandum that made security promises to Ukraine in exchange for giving up its nuclear arsenal, then the third largest in the world.
Nearly three years after Moscow launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian officials are calling the Budapest Memorandum of Security Pledges "a monument to myopia in strategic security decision-making" and are calling for their country's NATO membership.
US Presidents Bill Clinton, Ukrainian Leonid Kravchuk and Russian Boris Yeltsin, along with British Prime Minister John Major, signed the memorandum on December 5, 1994.
Stephen Pifer, a veteran diplomat who served as the US ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000, helped negotiate the memorandum.
"Basically, in that document, the US, Britain and Russia pledged to respect Ukraine's sovereignty, independence and existing borders, and pledged not to use force or threaten Ukraine with force," Pifer told VOA's Ukrainian newsroom.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine inherited the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world and agreed to transfer all nuclear munitions from its territory to Russia for dismantling, 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.
Holding a copy of the Budapest Memorandum after arriving in Brussels for a meeting of NATO foreign ministers, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sibiha called the agreement a reminder that any long-term decisions taken at the expense of Ukraine's security are "inappropriate and unacceptable."
"This document, this paper, failed to ensure Ukrainian security and transatlantic security," said Sibiha.
"So we have to avoid repeating these kinds of mistakes. This is, of course, the reason why we will discuss the concept of peace through strength with our partners, and we have a clear understanding of what steps we need from our friends."
In a statement dated December 3, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine stated: "The only real guarantee of Ukraine's security, as well as deterrence of further Russian aggression against Ukraine and other countries, is Ukraine's full membership in NATO."
Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, now the leader of the opposition, repeated this position in an interview with the Voice of America.
"We ask that you consider signing the [invitation] to [join] NATO as a permanent commitment of our partners, including the US, on the Budapest memorandum," Poroshenko said.
"This is a prerequisite when Ukraine voluntarily gives up the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world, and everyone said that if Ukraine now [had] this nuclear arsenal, there would be no war and occupation," Poroshenko added.
Russian officials accuse Ukraine and its partners of violating the Budapest Memorandum by expanding NATO - which they say threatens Russia's security interests.
Pifer recalls that in the early 1990s, Ukrainian officials asked what the US would do if Russia violated the Budapest Memorandum.
"We said the US is going to do things; we're going to take an interest," Pifer told VOA. "However, we were clear: we said, 'We're telling you now -- that doesn't mean we're going to send American military force to defend Ukraine.' That is why the document is a memorandum of security promises, not of security guarantees."
Marijana Budjerin, an author and senior research fellow at the Atomic Management Project at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center, believes that Ukraine and its Western partners have not fully recognized the Russian threat. Those were different times, she said.
"There was a narrative that Ukraine was a peaceful country and that it was not really a threat to anyone, and it should have joined the international community on good terms," she told Voice of America. "The Cold War is over, the Soviet Union has collapsed and the whole issue of weapons, including nuclear, has become a thing of the past."
After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Pfeiffer and others urged the administration of US President Barack Obama to provide Ukraine with defense assistance to meet its obligations under the Budapest Memorandum.
"I thought the Obama administration should have done more in terms of providing defense assistance to Ukraine," says Pifer. "But if you look at the last two and a half years, the Biden administration has provided more than $100 billion in military and financial aid to Ukraine. It's certainly consistent with what we were saying 30 years ago."
Budherin notes that the nuclear weapons Ukraine inherited in 1991 did not constitute "a full nuclear deterrent that [Ukraine] could simply grab and use to deter Russia."
“It was part of a nuclear arsenal developed by another country, the Soviet Union, for that country's strategic purposes. And the strategic goal of the Soviet Union was to deter NATO and the USA," says Budjerin and adds:
"But in the end, in order to have a credible nuclear deterrent, Ukraine would have to invest much more in an independent nuclear program, which it did not have."
Budjerin also states that Ukraine could have invested more in its conventional military capabilities after signing the memorandum. In the end, she says, "the main lesson for any country is that no document, no matter how legally binding or well-written and solid, is a sufficient basis for national security." You have to be able to really invest in your defense and national security."
The Budapest Memorandum is not the only document that Russia has signed and violated, which calls into question future agreements with Moscow, Pifer said: "This also happened with the Russian-Ukrainian Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Peace of 1997." There were several other documents where the Russian government clearly said, 'We recognize Ukraine within the 1991 borders. We will recognize and accept Ukrainian sovereignty and independence.'"
Budjerin says that this is also a great lesson for the international community:
"It's a story about how fragile our system of international law — international agreements — is, and that its credibility, its existence, its continued existence, and everything that goes with it, depends on how states voluntarily observe it, and that states respond adequately when a violation occurs".
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