By David Kurlander
President Biden on Tuesday urged Russian President Vladimir Putin by phone to “de-escalate tensions” with Ukraine, even offering a summit to talk through the wide range of issues between Washington and Moscow. Biden’s exhortation comes as 80,000 Russian troops amass between Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014, and nearby on the Eastern border of the two countries. The long and painful disintegration of Russian-Ukrainian relations began after a turbulent but hopeful period that followed the collapse of the U.S.S.R. That halcyon moment in the early 1990s, which culminated in a U.S.-led effort to denuclearize Ukraine, offers a painful example of diplomatic limits and a stark reminder of the centrality of nuclear weaponry in international power.
When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, four of the countries that emerged—Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine—still had numerous nuclear weapons in their respective new nations. Outside of Russia, Ukraine was the most armed, with more than 1,600 nuclear warheads, the majority of which were mounted on Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles and aimed at the United States. Ukraine and Russia had agreed in the immediate aftermath of the collapse to a system by which only their joint command could launch a strike, but the maintenance, security, and eventual destination of the missiles hung in the balance.
There was some disagreement among President George H.W. Bush’s team over what to do with the weapons. Many Pentagon-adjacent voices—including National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney—argued that there could be a benefit to allowing Ukraine and the other nuclear nations to keep some of their weapons as an eventual deterrent against a potentially resurgent Russia. Secretary of State James Baker, however, passionately argued against letting the new states have the bomb. “What the hell were we trying to do?” Baker reflected. “Stir up a nuclear rivalry in the heart of Eurasia?”
Baker took the lead, then, in crafting an agreement that compelled the three smaller new nations to return their warheads to Russia. In April 1992, Baker and representatives from the four post-Soviet nuclear nations met in Lisbon, where all parties agreed that Russia would take back the bombs and dismantle them in a highly regulated manner consistent with START I, an arms control treaty that Bush and Soviet President Gorbachev had signed shortly before the collapse. The smaller states could expect a better relationship with the United States and wouldn’t have to manage the remarkable expense of a nuclear arsenal while struggling with the more basic economic issues that accompanied their sudden independence.
By the time that President Clinton came into office in January 1993, however, Ukraine wasn’t seeming nearly as confident in the Lisbon Protocol. While the other states ratified the agreement quickly, the Rada—Ukraine’s parliament—became mired in fears about Russia’s power. Many of those fears were the same as they are today: Although Russian President Boris Yeltsin spoke of Ukraine’s sovereignty, Russia’s more nationalistic parliament had refused to sign a treaty recognizing Ukraine’s borders and in July 1993 claimed the Crimean port of Sevastopol.
Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s top Russia expert, met with Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk in May 1993, to try to break the logjam. Kravchuk asked for billions of dollars in aid and expressed pressing anxiety about Russia’s intentions. “The Ukrainians were paranoids with real enemies,” Talbott wrote in his memoir, The Russia Hand.
Yeltsin’s battle to control the discourse surrounding Ukraine led in part to the events of October 1993, when Yeltsin ordered the military to shell Russia’s parliamentary headquarters, called (somewhat confusingly) the White House, during a near-coup. Yeltsin ultimately regained control, but the violent events further heightened Ukraine’s interest in keeping the weapons. “As the Ukrainians saw it, everything Russia did was malevolent, menacing and unfair, and validated hanging on to ‘their’ missiles,” Talbott wrote. The two sides agreed in principle, though, to signing a trilateral pact with the U.S. to transfer the Ukrainian nukes back to Russia.
With Yeltsin narrowly hanging onto the presidency in the December 1993 election, Clinton headed to Moscow for his first time as President to complete the pact. On January 12th, 1994, the three nations signed a joint statement. In exchange for their cooperation, the Ukrainians would get $1 billion in civilian uranium from the warheads for use in power plants. “Getting the deal on uranium is a very good thing,” Clinton ebulliently told the press.
Yeltsin and Kravchuk—aware of the domestic criticism that would accompany the deal—appeared more somber. “Only Clinton seemed to enjoy the occasion,” Talbott observed. Clinton even wore a tie emblazoned with the words “Carpe Diem”—Latin for “seize the day.”
In June 1994, Kravchuk lost the presidency to Leonid Kuchma, a former director of a Soviet rocket factory. Another Clinton hand, Stephen Pifer, wrote that Kuchma’s background was cause for some optimism at the time, given that he “likely understood the technical and financial challenges that Ukraine would face if it tried to maintain nuclear weapons.”
Kuchma visited Washington in November 1994, with hyperinflation and continued parliamentary dissent over the nuclear question continuing to plague him in Kiev. Clinton praised him for staying the course on denuclearization, telling him upon arrival on the South Lawn, “Your boldness in the face of daunting problems reminds us of one of our greatest leaders, Franklin Roosevelt, who provided leadership in a time of great hardship.”
Two weeks after Kuchma’s visit, Clinton met him, Yeltsin, and British Prime Minister John Major in Budapest to sign another set of agreements, partially aimed at Ukraine’s still-skeptical legislators. The central tenet of the Budapest Memorandum was security assurances: if Ukraine “should become a victim of an act of aggression,” each signatory would “seek immediate United Nations Security Council action.” Russia, at least in theory, would have a hard time attacking Ukraine.
The last diplomatic hurdles in denuclearization had been cleared. U.S. aid poured in—the most that Washington gave to any nation except Israel, Egypt, and Russia. Over the next two years, trains left Ukraine carrying massive SS-19 and SS-24 ICBMs and headed toward Russian dismantlement facilities. Using U.S. aid money, Ukraine destroyed their missile silos and their Blackjack and Bear-H bomber planes. By June 1996, there were no nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Even some of the tensions between Ukraine and Russia appeared to dissolve, with Yeltsin and Kuchma working out a sharing agreement for Sevastopol in 1997.
But the security assurances—and the larger goodwill—were clearly short-lived. In 2000, Ukraine’s international standing took a hit after the release of secretly-recorded cassettes tying Kuchma to the kidnapping of a critical journalist. He was ousted in the bloodless and idealistic Orange Revolution four years later. Within a few years, Russia would be at the doorstep.
When Putin invaded Crimea in 2014, the broken dreams of the Budapest Memorandum loomed large. And when the U.S. ruled out direct military intervention, allies as far away as Japan wondered aloud whether they could rely on their own diplomatic agreements.
Now, as Russia threatens further incursions into Ukraine, the fears and promises that undergirded the denuclearization struggle have again come to the fore. Hopefully, the diplomatic efforts that the Biden administration pursues—whether in a summit or elsewhere—can lessen the gulf that threatens to send the region into further despair.
Beyond Talbott’s remarkable memoir, also check Steven Pifer’s 2017 The Eagle and the Trident: U.S.—Ukraine Relations in Turbulent Times. Former Stay Tuned guest and U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul and James Goldgeier wrote a concise and instructive history of post-Cold War diplomacy, the 2003 Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy Toward Russia After the Cold War.
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