Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine inherited the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal. Fearing a proliferation of nuclear weapons and seeking to stabilize the region, the United States, Russia, and the United Kingdom entered into negotiations with Ukraine.
This led to the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, signed in December 1994. Under this agreement:
* Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons and agreed to transfer all nuclear warheads to Russia for dismantlement. It also joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as a non-nuclear state.
* In exchange, the US, UK, and Russia provided security assurances to Ukraine. These were commitments to respect Ukraine's independence, sovereignty, and existing borders, and to refrain from using force against its territorial integrity.
The key term was "assurances," not "guarantees." This meant they were political commitments, not a formal military alliance like NATO's Article 5, which would have required a direct military response to an attack.
Russia first violated the Budapest Memorandum in 2014 by annexing Crimea and instigating a war in eastern Ukraine. Its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was a further, and more blatant, violation of the agreement, as it directly used military force to undermine Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity.
by acutepalepanda
19 Comments
We are incredibly lucky that Ukraine gave up those nukes. Imagine if the war with Russia went nuclear.
not only nukes. bombers. non nuclear long range missiles. stuff ukraine needs now.
here Barrack Husain Obama
[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2573557/Flashback-Senator-Obama-pushed-destruction-15-000-TONS-ammunition-400-000-small-arms-1-000-anti-aircraft-missiles-Ukraine.html](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2573557/Flashback-Senator-Obama-pushed-destruction-15-000-TONS-ammunition-400-000-small-arms-1-000-anti-aircraft-missiles-Ukraine.html)
disarming ukraine back in 2013
Russia lied???
The thing is that these nukes could not be used from Ukraine.
i always thought people outgrow cheap ass promises from kindergarten
There are a lot of misunderstandings around this agreement, nations agreed not to mess with Ukraine *themselves*, not to defend it.Â
Unfortunately with the US extorting Ukraine for mineral rights, the UK is now the sole party left who keep by the pact.
And that’s exactly why Ukraine should not be forced to pay the US for military aid (e.g. with resources) but the traitors* in the White House don’t want to hear that.
*that makes them quite literally traitors of Ukraine btw., so don’t come at me because I insulted your favorite child rapist
Ukraine was a lawless kleptocracy then (and still is, albeit less). Any nukes in Ukraine would have had an unacceptably high chance of just being sold off. Even if they hadn’t, the lack of very expensive maintenance on them would have been problematic. And even if they had been maintained, they did not have the means to launch them. So, more narrative than fact here.
“your” heh
I’m heavily invested in seeing what Ukraine becomes after they win the war.
Here’s hoping they go the same way Poland did and become a military powerhouse.
Ngl, maybe right wing americans have a point about all that second amendment stuff.
Kazakhstan also possessed more than 1000 Soviet nukes and voluntarily handed them over to Russia. They wouldn’t be able to use them anyway, just like Ukraine.
2 problems with this line of thinking:
1) the nukes were never the property of Ukraine. They belonged to the USSR
2) they had no capacity to maintain the stockpile, meaning the weapons would have always gone defunct
So true lmao
Sadly they took it a bit too close to the heart and took it upon themselves to prove the no attack wrong
Yeah, uhm exept they were never theirs
So what should Biden have actually done in 2021/2022 when he had pretty ironclad evidence that Russia was going to invade. Was there any way he could have actually put US peacekeepers in border positions without going to war with Russia? Apart from flooding Ukraine with perfect intel and Javelins, what could he have done against a nuclear Russia?
Tbh Ukraine shouldn’t have never trust any major power , 20th century middle East history is great example for it. Even if Ukraine decide to give up their nukes in return they must have gotten non-negotiable guarantees instead of assurances.
Deeply dumb!
By 2014, those nukes would be retired, since nukes di have an expiry date.
I also highly doubt Ukraine would have had the money to keep making more.
It’s a brutal lesson in realpolitik. Giving up those weapons in exchange for paper promises only works if the other signatories act in good faith, which Russia clearly never did. Now every nation watching this sees that having a credible deterrent might be the only real security guarantee.