Ukraine gave up it nukes as Soviet Union collapsed

 Jamie McIntyre:

In 1994, the US succeeded in convincing Ukraine to give up its nukes but failed to secure its future

...

 In return for becoming a nonnuclear weapons state as a signatory of the Nonproliferation Treaty, Ukraine would get financial compensation, economic assistance, and essential security assurances from the U.S., United Kingdom, and Russia recognizing Ukraine’s “independence and sovereignty” and specifying its existing borders could be changed “only peacefully by mutual agreement.”

Those assurances would prove worthless two decades later when Putin’s Russia illegally annexed Crimea and, through proxies, took control of the Donbas area of eastern Ukraine.

When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, Ukraine inherited nearly 2,000 nuclear weapons, including 176 ICBMs and some of the Soviet’s most modern bombers armed with long-range nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.

Had Ukraine retained the Soviet arsenal, it would have been the third most powerful nuclear nation on Earth after the U.S. and Russia, and it arguably would have been vulnerable to threats from Putin.

But in 1994, the U.S. was far more concerned with America’s security than Ukraine’s, mainly because there was no predicting what kind of government would emerge from the fledgling democracy.

Plus, Ukraine wasn’t the only former Soviet republic with nuclear weapons. Belarus and Kazakhstan had them, too.

Secretary of State James Baker was among those who believed that in the bitterly divided former Soviet Union, allowing the newly independent states to remain armed with nuclear weapons would be folly, something Baker compared to a “Yugoslavia with nukes” in December 1991.

“That could be an extraordinarily dangerous situation for Europe and for the rest of the world — indeed for the United States,” Baker said on CBS’s Face the Nation.

Giving up its nukes was controversial in Ukraine at the time, but ultimately, the new country had little choice if it wanted to forge better relations with the West.

It also wasn’t clear if Ukraine had operational control of the weapons or whether Moscow retained the launch codes.

Ultimately, Ukraine’s miscalculation was not so much giving up its nukes but giving them up in return for vague assurances that could be ignored with no consequences.

...

Does anyone really believe that Biden will do anything other than impose more sanctions on Russia?  I am positive that Putin does not believe that the US or NATO will go to war to protect Ukraine.

See, also:

Ukraine blames Russia for cyberattack against government agencies

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