In all the years I interacted with Russian negotiating teams during the arms control talks of the Cold War period, I recall seeing only one Ukrainian official on the other side of the table, and that was a Soviet general who did not seem to participate in any of the discussions. This was despite the fact that Ukraine was then the second-largest of the 15 Soviet republics, and it had perhaps the most important military facilities outside the Russian Republic. As the Soviet Union was collapsing in late 1991, Ukraine had more than 4,000 nuclear weapons on its territory, suddenly making it the world’s third-largest nuclear power, after the United States and Russia. In addition, Ukrainian industry had manufactured missiles for Soviet nuclear weapons.
And yet the posture of leaders in Moscow toward their Ukrainian compatriots was one of chauvinism and superiority. Ukrainians had long been subjugated by the Russian Empire and, except for a rocky five years between the end of World War I and the consolidation of the Soviet Union, they were unable to secure independence until after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Even today, Russians still refer to Ukrainians as “Little Russians,” a term that reflects Putin’s publicly stated motivations for recapturing Ukraine and eliminating its independent identity.
That kind of outlook extends from Russia’s historical record of often-horrific treatment of the Ukrainians, including Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s 1930s policy of deliberate starvation of Ukrainian peasants that is known as the Holodomor, a memorial to which now stands prominent in Washington. The total Ukrainian death toll was at least 3.9 million. This history explains why Ukrainians today are highly reluctant to enter any peace arrangement with Russia without an ironclad security mechanism that cannot be compromised, as was the 1994 “Budapest Memorandum.” Russia, under President Vladimir Putin, has repeatedly violated that security agreement – in 2014 with its capture of Crimea and the invasion of eastern Ukraine, and of course most dramatically with the February 2022 full-scale invasion. The Budapest Memorandum had been signed by Russia and Ukraine, with the United States and the United Kingdom, in association with the conclusion of the process that resulted in the START nuclear-weapons reduction treaty. The Budapest Memorandum ostensibly assured Ukraine’s security and territorial integrity if it surrendered the nuclear weapons on its soil.
Yet today, Ukraine, which did give up those weapons, is fighting an existential war launched by Russia. So, Ukrainians are determined that any new peace agreement ensure that they will never have to fight another one. It is simply mindless to try to push Ukraine into a settlement just for the sake of any agreement. Words on paper are not enough.
Decades of Talks…And a Power’s Collapse
My own role as an arms negotiator in the U.S. government came to involve Ukraine after the Soviet Union officially passed into history on Dec. 31, 1991, and Ukraine became an independent country. Negotiations in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), which had begun in November 1969 in Helsinki, Finland, were held on a rotating basis between Helsinki and Vienna and concluded in Helsinki with the signing of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Interim SALT agreement in 1972. The follow-up talks, SALT 2, began in late 1972 and migrated to Geneva, Switzerland, on a permanent basis. Those negotiations then morphed into the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) that culminated, more than two decades later, with the treaty entering into force in December 1994 in Budapest, Hungary, where President Bill Clinton signed for the United States and Putin for Russia. Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan also joined that treaty pursuant to the 1992 Lisbon Protocol, which modified the START Treaty to add the obligations of the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union (more on that later).
At the time of Ukraine’s emergence as a sovereign country, I was serving as the general counsel of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA). (I later served as Bill Clinton’s ambassador for arms control, non-proliferation, and disarmament.) The START Treaty had been signed by U.S. President George H.W. Bush and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in July 1991, pending ratification by each side’s legislative branch, limiting each country to 6,000 strategic nuclear weapons. Three months later, in October 1991, the two leaders concluded a further, informal agreement known as the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives, in which the United States would eventually eliminate 95 percent of its tactical nuclear weapons and the then-Soviet Union would do the same. (Because no verification was conducted by either side, it has never been clear what Russia, which succeeded the Soviet Union in that agreement, actually did). The two sides also agreed that nuclear weapons could no longer be deployed on surface ships, that strategic bombers would be taken off alert, and nuclear-capable missile systems in excess of START Treaty limits would be deactivated. Most significantly, considering the collapse of the Soviet Union a few months later, the two countries agreed that all Soviet tactical nuclear weapons would be brought back to the then-Russian Republic, which was accomplished in January 1991.
A New Conundrum for the NPT
But strategic offensive nuclear arms remained deployed on the territories of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, all of which had just become nascent independent nations. That was a major problem, because that would mean three more nuclear weapon States in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which only recognized five original nuclear weapon states, the number that existed when the treaty was signed and when it entered into force in 1970: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, China, and Russia. Any other countries that later came to possess nuclear weapons either never joined the NPT – India, Pakistan, Israel, for example (India and Israel were known to be pursuing nuclear weapons at the time) – or had joined as a non-nuclear weapon state and later withdrew – North Korea.
With respect to the START Treaty, the United States, the U.K., France, China, and Russia agreed in January 1992 that the relevant successor states to the Soviet Union would be Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. And while several alternatives were considered for how to deal with the START Treaty given the new situation, none of us in the U.S. government wanted to renegotiate the treaty, given its vast complexity and the endless headaches it would cause to include new countries in the agreement. Such a challenge might be a lawyer’s dream, but definitely not a dream for a diplomat.
President Bush also was determined that no new countries would be added to the number of recognized “nuclear weapon States” in the NPT, then and now regarded as the centerpiece of international security. While the NPT’s language delineating only five nuclear powers necessarily meant only one country could inherit the Soviet Union’s status as one of the five, Ukraine emerged from the USSR’s collapse with, as noted earlier, more than 4,000 nuclear weapons on its territory. Increasingly concerned about potential hostility from Moscow, Kyiv viewed those weapons as a valuable insurance policy.
Facing this conundrum, the State Department tasked me with writing a briefing memorandum for department leaders. The April 10, 1992, memorandum stated that it was clear that the NPT’s negotiators intended that there could never be more than five nuclear weapon States that were parties to the NPT. In her superb 2022 book “Inheriting the Bomb,” Harvard Belfer Center Associate Mariana Budjeryn references the memo, observing that “only five states met the criteria for NWS status under Article IX of the treaty whereby a nuclear weapon state is one which has manufactured and exploded a nuclear weapon or nuclear explosive device prior to January 1, 1967…there is no question that the negotiators of the treaty intended that there could ever be more than five. In other words, no additional states could join the treaty in the capacity of nuclear weapon states without defying the very purpose for which the NPT was concluded” – that is, to discourage the further proliferation of nuclear weapons.
More than 30 years later, I continue to defend the NPT, which still comprises only five nuclear weapon state parties. In an April 3 article this year with regular co-author Professor David Bernell of Oregon State University, entitled “The Greatest Possible Danger and Hazard,” we noted President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 use of that phrase to describe the risk posed by the spread of nuclear weapons. Four countries had them at the time, and China became the fifth in 1964.
Searching for a Fix
So after the December 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, in early January 1992, Secretary of State James Baker visited Moscow, Kyiv, Minsk, and Almaty to discuss the future relationships between the United States and the newly independent states, particularly with respect to arms control. This was followed by a full interagency team of some 20 U.S. officials in the second week of January 1992 to discuss all aspects of the arms control obligations of those states. The delegation was led by Undersecretary of State for International Security Reginald Bartholomew and included the State Department’s highly knowledgeable Jim Timbie; John Shalikashvili, the Joint Staff officer responsible for disarmament who later went on to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Steve Hadley, the capable assistant secretary of defense for international security who later became George W. Bush’s national security advisor; and Doug MacEachin, a highly respected senior CIA officer, later the deputy director of the CIA. I attended as the ACDA general counsel.
We went to Moscow first, where we held thorough consultations with a Russian team led by Ambassador Alexey Obukhov, a man whom I had come to know very well during the SALT II and the U.S. and Soviet Nuclear and Space Arms negotiations of the late 1980s. (My most vivid memory of Obukhov occurred more than four years earlier at the end of the INF negotiations in 1987. Reagan and Gorbachev were scheduled to sign the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty at the White House on Dec. 8 that year. But on the morning of Dec. 7 in Geneva, the negotiators had still not finished the treaty, and a U.S. Air Force cargo plane was waiting at the airport to carry those who would be going to the signing in Washington. The concluding negotiation would have to take place on the plane among just four of us who had the authority to make decisions: U.S. Ambassador Michael Glitman, who headed the U.S. INF delegation, and myself, plus Obukhov and an aide for the Soviet side. We raced the clock on board but managed to reach the final agreement. After we arrived, the necessary clerical work was done at the State Department, but when I received the original copies of the treaty at the State Department the following morning, I found a glaring typo that I don’t recall now but that changed the meaning of the treaty and had to be fixed. Fortunately, Glitman was in the building, so I could easily get his initials on the revised original copies, but then I had to go to the Russian Embassy and find Obukhov just as the General Secretary was arriving. Somehow I found Obukhov, and he initialed the texts to indicate that their principals could sign, as was the tradition. So the INF treaty was signed on time, on the afternoon of Dec. 8, 1987, at the White House, only a few hours after the treaty was finalized. It was probably the only time a major U.S. treaty was concluded with a foreign country’s representative while in flight on an Air Force plane.)
But spinning forward to January 1992 and the arms control talks with the former Soviet states, Obukhov greeted us all in Moscow by declaring, “Welcome to the Russian Foreign Ministry.” There was not much disagreement between our two sides. We affirmed to the Russians that the United States recognized Russia as the successor state to the Soviet Union for the NPT, and we discussed with them the need to provide for succession for the START Treaty and the 1990 Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE). The Russians stated that it was important that all of the newly independent states would join the NPT as non-nuclear weapon states. By implication, that meant those new states would have to give up their nuclear weapons. The Russians also stressed the importance of the continued viability of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) in its relationship to START. The U.S. delegation agreed.
At the next stop, Kyiv, however, our experience was considerably different. The Ukrainians strongly asserted their desire to be both a party to START and accede to the NPT as a nuclear weapon state. I recall a senior Ukrainian official firmly describing his country as the France of the East – and France has nuclear weapons. It was clear to me after those talks that we would have a long road to travel with Ukraine.
We then moved on to Minsk, where we stayed at the then-late Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s former hunting lodge outside of the city and held our meetings there. I recall deep snow covering the beautiful countryside all around us. Our discussions with Belarus couldn’t have been better: they agreed to cooperate on START and would join the NPT as a non-nuclear weapon state.
After the discussions with Belarus, we were planning to proceed to our fourth and last stop in Alma-Ata, as the Kazakhstan capital Almaty was known then. (An aside: Before we took off, our advance man called and told us that the Kazakhstanis had informed him that they would not provide gas for our U.S. Air Force plane to leave Kazakhstan, unless we gave them $20,000 in small bills. They would not accept credit cards, and while they had earlier apparently accepted a check from Secretary Baker, they would not accept one from us. As I stood on the tarmac in Minsk next to Undersecretary Bartholomew, or Reg, as we called him, a small plane pulled up nearby. Ambassador Jack Maresca, the U.S. ambassador to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (now the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE) and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Europe and NATO, was arriving from Frankfurt, where the United States held its funds. He stepped out of the plane, walked over to where Bartholomew was standing and without comment handed him a briefcase that apparently contained $20,000 in small bills. For a moment, I laughed to myself that I wasn’t sure whether we were doing disarmament or running drugs.)
We arrived at Alma-Ata in the early morning, our last stop on the disarmament consultation trip. Bartholomew went off to meet with the prime minister and later with President Nursultan Nazarbayev, while the rest of us called on the Foreign Ministry to discuss NPT, CFE, and START. Kazakhstan had only been an independent state for about two weeks, and clearly their officials were very much in learning mode. Our contact at the ministry said the only officials who worked on substance there were the foreign minister and his deputy; everyone else worked on protocol. But the requisite meetings were arranged, and the Kazakhstanis indicated they wanted to cooperate on all three treaties. That was particularly welcome for us, considering that soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Nazarbayev had publicly stated that Kazakhstan would join the NPT as a nuclear weapon state. He had clearly backed off that view.
There was a special urgency to this stop, too. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan still had on its territory more than 100 SS-18 strategic nuclear missiles, each outfitted with 10 500-kiloton warheads, then the world’s most powerful nuclear weapon systems, although the United States was building its equivalent. Nazarbayev had informed Bartholomew that he had already received offers from several Middle Eastern countries to purchase some of the warheads, but he had refused all offers. In a later-declassified operation called Project Sapphire, the United States worked with Kazakhstan to remove the fissile material.
From Agreement in Theory to Agreement in Practice
Various concepts had been advanced for dealing with the new fact that START now involved formerly Soviet strategic arms deployed in four newly independent states. Reasonably early, leaders of all parties decided to make the treaty multilateral. Though that set off a difficult negotiation with Ukraine, it did lead to the aforementioned Lisbon Protocol of May 1992, in which all three non-Russian successor states — Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan — agreed to assume the obligations of the START Treaty and to join the NPT as non-nuclear weapon states – meaning returning the strategic nuclear weapons on their territories to Russia — “in the shortest possible time.”
Persuading Ukraine to meet the latter of those terms, however, was like pulling teeth. The presidents of the three states agreed to sign letters to President Bush clarifying their commitments, outside the text of the Lisbon Protocol. But while Belarus and Kazakhstan promptly supplied the letters, working with Ukraine’s President Leonid Kravchuk was excruciating. There was considerable friction and back-and-forth between Washington and Kyiv (then still known by the Russian spelling Kiev), and even after much debate, the Kravchuk letter remained ambiguous. Ukraine also insisted on a reference in the letter to the importance of security guarantees. Although Kazakhstan first demanded the same, it soon backed away. Ukraine never did. As the Ukrainians saw it, Russia was far too great a threat. Those of us negotiating with Ukraine at the time saw their recalcitrance as inhibiting progress. But their fears of Russia, of course, have proven to be correct – devastatingly so.
In the end, the Lisbon Protocol was approved as envisioned, and by the time the START Treaty had been ratified and entered into force in December 1994, the three non-Russian former Soviet republics had given up their strategic arms and joined the NPT as non-nuclear weapon state parties. But it was never an easy path, right up until the May 1992 signing ceremony. Secretary Baker asked me to arrive in Lisbon two days prior to the ceremony, to work out any “last-minute details,” so when I arrived in Lisbon, I made the rounds of the delegations. Belarus presented no difficulties. While the Kazakhstanis were hard to track down, once I found them, they also were very cooperative. Then I had a long meeting with the Russians, and they were on board, though they made it abundantly clear that it was absolutely essential that non-Russian parties would join the NPT as non-nuclear weapons state parties. It also would be a condition for ratification by Russia’s parliament, the Duma.
The Ukrainians were a completely different matter. Whereas one meeting sufficed with each of the other parties, I had three with the Ukrainians that nevertheless came to an unsatisfactory conclusion. Their posture essentially was maybe they would sign, or maybe not. They were still not convinced. Moreover, they were even uncertain about providing a signed copy of the Kravchuk letter. The next evening, I reported the challenges to the State Department’s Timbie, who was in London with Baker on other business. Timbie called me early the next morning and said that Baker, as soon as he learned of our travails, had gotten Ukrainian Foreign Minister Anatoliy Zlenko on the phone. “I will tell you later what the Secretary said,” Timbie told me, “but suffice it to say that I have never heard one man speak to another in quite that way.”
So, the Ukrainians were cooperative after all, and the signing of the Lisbon Protocol went ahead as planned. The day of the ceremony, I was asked by Baker’s staff to brief the four foreign ministers on the procedure to be followed. I did so as Baker, his counterparts and all their staffs were crammed into a tiny holding room off the large room where the waiting documents were arranged on a table. We could hardly turn around. As I finished my explanation and how they would know the ceremony was concluded, Baker interjected, “And then you all leave!” He didn’t want any Ukrainian or Russian speeches. The signing went off without a hitch, to the applause of the delegations.
The campaign for START ratification and, thus, entry into force was reasonably constructive, at least until its very end. Kazakhstan and Belarus ratified START, gave up their nuclear weapons, and joined the NPT in 1993. Ukraine’s Rada (parliament), after several false starts, approved the START treaty early in 1994 but held back on ratifying the NPT. The plan had been for the START Treaty to be brought into force as part of the CSCE summit in December 1994 in Budapest. But something had to be done regarding Ukraine and the NPT.
Given the situation, Rose Gottemoeller, senior arms control official at the National Security Council for the newly independent states who later became undersecretary for arms control and international security and deputy secretary general of NATO, called and asked me to go to Kyiv and make a pitch for the NPT. At the time, I was very involved in a project on the pending indefinite extension of the NPT (which ultimately was achieved in May 1995), but I agreed I would go to Kyiv in mid-September, with the CSCE summit less than three months away.
My principal talking point was going to be that the NPT is the “club of civilization” and it was time Ukraine joined it. I had a good reception in the Foreign Ministry, where I met with Ambassador Boris Tarasuk and Kostiantin Hyrashchenko, the key figures in the government on this subject, and I had a most constructive discussion separately with the chairman of the Rada’s International Security Committee. Next my schedule called for me to meet with the deputy leader of the Rada. But when I walked into the very large room where he was to meet me, klieg lights went on, and I found myself giving a speech to perhaps 20-plus members of the Rada sitting on risers in front of television cameras. I strongly emphasized “the club of civilization” idea, and all of the discussion was positive. The Rada approved the NPT two weeks later and START was formally brought into force at the CSCE summit in December. After 22 years of talks, we finally had a complete strategic offensive arms agreement in force.
The Threat to Ukraine
As we now know, however, there was a missing piece – and an unfortunate side to all this. It had been essential to the viability of the NPT that the weapons on Ukraine’s territory be sent to Russia. But Ukraine viewed Russia as such a threat that they demanded more be done to satisfy their security concerns. After all, Russia still had a naval base at Sevastopol on Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, the home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. (Soviet leaders had transferred control of Crimea to the Ukrainian Republic in 1954.) Russia continues to desire the minerals in Ukraine’s Donbas region, the location of much of the fighting in recent years, and Ukraine has some of the richest farmland in Eastern Europe. Furthermore, the Kremlin was already aware of the greater affinity the Ukrainian people had for the West compared with the East. That dynamic came to a climax in 2013 and 2014, when a pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovych, sought to pull the country back from its ambitions to join the European Union, sparking protests that ultimately prompted him to flee – tellingly, to Moscow. Putin captured Crimea shortly thereafter and went on to invade eastern Ukraine in April 2014.
Throughout the 1994 CSCE Summit and conference in Budapest, the Ukrainians had demanded binding security guarantees if they were to transfer their weapons to Russia and be left defenseless. Toward the end of the summit, there was a half-hearted attempt to do so, by means of a document called the Budapest Memorandum, a politically binding (that is, not legally binding) agreement in which Russia, the U.K., and the United States gave assurances of securing Ukraine’s borders in exchange for Ukraine transferring the nuclear weapons to Russia. Ukraine clearly expected the United States and the U.K. to live up to the agreement. But in practice, the United States did not treat it as legally binding and gave it little attention.
A Promise Made Is a Debt Unpaid
Russia has violated Ukraine’s border three times since signing the Budapest Memorandum: seizing Crimea in 2014; seizing part of the Donbas (and trying to acquire all of it) the same year; and launching an all-out invasion in 2022, which became a brutal, destructive, illegal war. In the first two cases, the U.K. and the United States did nothing beyond issuing weak protests and sanctions. They did little to make Russia pay a substantive price for its actions. In subsequent years, the United States did help Ukraine’s military to a certain extent with supplies and training. But only after Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion did NATO and EU countries finally begin sending massive quantities of arms to Ukraine. Their assistance to Ukraine has proven decisive in helping it hold off Russian forces — to a degree.
But it was too late to have prevented Russia’s all-out push to conquer Ukraine, even though Russian forces had massed along Ukraine’s borders for months before February 2022, and the United States had been warning of the likely scenario. If the United States had sent substantial forces into Ukraine in advance to protect it, there would have been no full-scale invasion in 2022.
So the United States has a substantial unfulfilled obligation to set things right, whatever that may take. That should mean at the very least exerting maximum pressure on Russia to compromise and, in the meantime, supporting European efforts to aid Ukraine with any military assistance required, including intelligence, logistics, potential deployments, and more. One can only hope that the United States will live up to its promise in time to save Ukraine from a war that never should have happened.
