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Ukraine once possessed the world’s third-largest stash of nuclear weapons. Many Ukrainians wish they still had them.
In 1994, through what became known as the “Trilateral Process,” Kiev traded those warheads for clear assurances of what it assumed would be permanent peace and security.
Today, Putin’s Russia possesses the warheads Ukraine once owned. And there is no peace.
The original deal was cut with Russia and the US. Great Britain was a party to the negotiations. France and China signaled their approval.
Here’s the back story:
When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, a substantial chunk of its nuclear weapons arsenal was parked in Ukraine.
The stash inherited by the Kiev regime included enough atomic bombs and warheads---about 1700--- to make it the world’s third-largest atomic power.
Ukraine also housed more than a dozen Soviet-made nuclear power plants. Chernobyl Unit 4 had exploded in 1986, spewing radiation throughout Europe and worldwide. Significant “hot” fallout was detected in a bird sanctuary north of San Francisco within ten days, then travelled across the US to New England, where it was measured in milk.
According to a 2007 report from the Russian Academy of Sciences, Chernobyl’s fallout had by then killed some 985,000 humans worldwide, with the death toll continuing to rise.
Chernobyl’s radioactive fallout decimated the economies of Ukraine and neighboring Belarus, costing each a half-trillion dollars by some estimates. Former Soviet Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev cited the Chernobyl disaster as a prime cause of the fall of the USSR.
Amidst the post-Cold War movement to reduce the number of nuclear weapons on the planet, the Clinton Administration helped facilitate the 1994 negotiations between Kiev and Moscow aimed at moving those old warheads the fallen Soviets had left behind in Ukraine. The UK, France and China all approved.
Ukraine eventually gave the Russians about 1,700 nuke warheads. It also dismantled its ICBM missiles and their launch sites. Fellow former Soviet Republics Belarus and Kazakhstan followed suit.
In return, Americans guaranteed the Ukrainians their help in protecting the peace.
The Ukrainians also received radioactive fuel for their remaining reactors.
The Budapest Memorandum was widely hailed as an historic step toward a post-nuclear world. But on December 31, 1999, Vladimir Putin took the reins in Russia. His puppet, Viktor Yanukovych, soon took control of Ukraine.
In 2004-5, the popular grassroots “Orange Revolution” forced Yanukovych from power.
But in 2010, amidst an economic downturn, Yanukovych took back power in a bitterly contested election that brought the ouster of Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko, Ukraine’s first female leader.
In 2014, Yanukovich allowed Putin’s forces to take the Crimean Peninsula without meaningful resistance. In 2015, Putin staged a Crimean plebiscite meant to lend a public mandate for Russian control. International outcry came with no firm action.
In 2017, amidst a strong grassroots pro-western public uprising, Yanukovych appeared poised to sign an economic agreement with the European Union. But when he balked, the historic Maidan movement erupted in the streets of Kiev. Thousands of Ukrainians---branded as “Nazis” and western-funded “dupes” by Putin and his supporters---took persistently to the streets. After more than a hundred were killed in fierce, prolonged mass demonstrations, Yanukovych fled to Moscow.
https://www.netflix.com/title/80031666
Putin billed the prospect of deepened economic and military ties (including a possible alignment with NATO) as a “provocation.”
While keeping the nuclear weapons Russia got from Kiev in 1994, Putin angrily buried the remnants of the nuclear disarmament agreement embodied in the Budapest Memorandum. In 2022 he sent his troops pouring into the border provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk.
In both public and private boasts, Putin made it clear that he expected to defeat Ukraine in a matter of days.
Russian soldiers invading Ukraine through its northern neighbor, Belarus, took control of the still-seething site at Chernobyl. The chaotic, dangerously incompetent, bitterly disputed occupation threatened renewed disaster. An Iranian drone of the type used widely by the Russians recently hit the $2 billion sarcophagus that covers the site, significantly damaging the world’s largest movable structure.
Six Ukrainian reactors in war-torn Zaporizhzhia are currently controlled by Russia. Two Russian reactors sit perilously in Kursk, also a war zone.
Nuclear experts warn that military operations threatening these embattled reactors in these war zones pose an enormous risk to the future of human survival. A single drone, operated by a single combatant, could easily cause another Chernobyl-sized catastrophe.
https://freepress.org/article/putin%E2%80%99s-drone-hit-chernobyl-today-sends-us-all-atomic-message
Overall, Putin and his supporters argue a “pro-Nazi” contingent within Ukraine poses an aggressive threat to Russian security. He angrily equates Ukraine’s public support for an economic alliance with the European Union, or the possibility that Ukraine might join NATO, as core causes of his attack.
But while the war rages, on-and-off negotiations continue in the long shadow of those nuclear armaments Ukraine thought it had traded for peace. A strong Ukrainian contingent openly regrets having given them up. And the history of the Budapest Memorandum gets no real nods from Trump, Putin and those who apparently wish them permanently consigned to a convenient Orwellian memory hole.
That topic certainly got no mention from Donald Trump amidst his legendary Oval Office blow-up with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Meanwhile, the region’s murderous shift to drone warfare has radically altered the balance of battlefield power. Next to be seen may be whether drone-heavy Ukraine, with some European help, might be able to hold off the Russians without Trump’s Americans.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/03/world/europe/ukraine-russia-war-drones-deaths.html
Meanwhile, embattled Ukrainians mourn those peaceful assurances Russia and the US promised in exchange for those atomic warheads they gave up three bloody decades ago.
Most Mondays at 5pm ET, Harvey Wasserman co-convenes the Green Grassroots Election Protection Zooms ( www.grassrootsep.org). He wrote THE PEOPLE’S SPIRAL OF US HISTORY and SOLARTOPIA! Our Green-Powered Earth (https://www.solartopia.org).