It was a critical question and one that never received a definitive answer. 

Three months later, when Senator Richard Lugar raised these very same Ukrainian concerns to Secretary Baker in a public hearing, America’s chief diplomat demurred.

“As a part of the package from Ukraine,” said the Senate’s disarmament champion, there was “a very strong invitation to the United States to provide security to Ukraine.” “Clearly,” he added, “with some frequency,” and “very overtly,” leaders in Kyiv had expressed dismay “about giving up nuclear weapons and not knowing of their disposition by Russia and looking to us for some security.” He asked directly, “How are we responding to that?”

With regard to “formal security guarantees,” Baker replied, “We did not think it appropriate to provide” them.

For his part, then-Senator Joe Biden chimed in to suggest that Kyiv accept legal obligations to disarm or “be faced with a three-to-one superiority of nuclear weapons from Russia.” In one breath, he contemplated Ukraine becoming an independent nuclear power left beholden to Russia due to its nuclear dominance. A coercive double bind became a feature, not a glitch of disarmament.

Despite these inklings, Baker hectored Ukraine to confirm its renunciation of nuclear weapons by fully accepting various treaty obligations, including START. The full-court press to remove nuclear weapons from Ukrainian soil would soon transform from a key objective under the Bush Administration into an urgent and overriding imperative for its successor.

A Rodney Dangerfield Problem

Six days after President Clinton raised his hand from the Bible, he was on the phone with then-Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk, insisting on ratification of START and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. While Clinton told Kravchuk that he intended to “extend strong security assurances upon your ratification,” the menu of options to hasten Ukraine’s denuclearization actually remained largely set from the beginning. Kyiv needed to ratify these treaties (and related addenda) and agree to transfer all the nuclear warheads on its territory to Russia.

In return, Ukraine would receive “security assurances,” restatements of existing commitments under the United Nations and similar institutions where Russia pledged it would not violate Ukrainian borders. In essence, nice words that lacked real teeth. Limited sweeteners were available: Moscow could be persuaded to compensate Kyiv fully for highly enriched uranium, for instance, and Washington could provide technical assistance and other aid. But the issue of defending Ukraine’s territorial integrity was never truly up for debate.

Nevertheless, a version of these terms ultimately made up what became known as the Trilateral Agreement between the United States, Russia, and Ukraine, which prefigured the Budapest Memorandum.

A few months later, in April 1993, Kravchuk confided to then-Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze his “main headache” that “Moscow and the U.S. together have been twisting my arms painfully” in “demanding [the] transfer [of Ukraine’s nuclear weapons] to the Russian Federation.”

“I would understand Russia’s nastiness,” Kravchuk lamented, “But Americans are even worse—they do not listen to our arguments.”

Shevardnadze remarked to his fellow post-Soviet leader:

[The Americans] do not know about our terrible, rough relations with the Russian empire [and] the USSR. Without that knowledge, building predictable and trustworthy relations with ‘democratic Yeltsin and Russia’ would be very difficult, whom [the Americans] currently call ‘Russian democrats’...I know many of them, talked to them a lot. They are still sick with imperial infection.

He went on, referring to his previous job—as Soviet foreign minister:

Being a member of the Politburo I had access to many confidential and top-secret documents—secret reports, notes, different non-papers elaborated in different Soviet structures—the Central Committee offices, KGB, Military Intelligence, think tanks and so forth. Maybe you too know about them. But my access was much deeper and wider…I can say that the documents I have read were just horrible and frightening: about the different scenarios of relations of the Center [Moscow] with the Soviet republics directed toward ‘different kinds of emergencies.’ They included the partition of those republics, expelling their populations to different parts of Siberia and the Soviet Far East—indeed some remote places. To accomplish those goals, they will use military force.

“All those plans are not archival ones!” he continued. “They are fully intact to be used if Moscow makes that decision.”

Shevardnadze implored Kravchuk to “negotiate so as not to undermine your independence and your security.” After all, he observed, “if Ukraine succeeds in keeping at least one nuclear missile as a deterrent to defend itself, it will succeed in safeguarding its independence and sovereignty from those mad men in the Kremlin.”

“Just one nuclear missile.” It was a prophetic observation from a man who understood the inner workings of the Kremlin better than almost anyone else. Shevardnadze told Kravchuk that Russia’s new leaders “understand only power, they are afraid of it.” Nonetheless, forces beyond Kyiv’s control would continue to agitate fiercely against its primary means of deterrence. Moreover, it wasn’t as if they did not have a sense of the Russian threat themselves—of the throughline of deceit that Shevardnadze had so artfully drawn between the Soviet leadership and its Russian successors.

Later that year, in November 1993, Ambassador-at-Large Strobe Talbott wrote to then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher that he had “reached Henry Kissinger over the weekend” about “his skepticism about whether ‘the bear can change his spots.’” Kissinger, too, was questioning “both our NATO policy and our Ukraine policy.”

Documents from the same period suggest Talbott may have been entertaining similar misgivings. In September, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Graham Allison and associate B. G. Riley had written to him with their “concern about Russian unilateralism and increasing Russian pressure upon other states of the former Soviet Union.” They noted Moscow’s “unilateral abolition of unified control of strategic nuclear weapons,” as had been agreed under previous arrangements, “and assumption of direct Russian command.” They noted that while negotiating joint control of the Black Sea fleet the month before, “Russia blackmailed Kravchuk with oil and gas.” The ensuing circumstances were dire: “If Russia cuts off oil and gas, Kravchuk…will be forced out.”

Senior administration officials also appeared confident that Ukraine did, in fact, possess the means to become a fully nuclear-capable state. Clinton’s CIA Director-in-waiting, James Woolsey, wrote a memo during the campaign that concluded “Ukraine, unlike Byelarus [sic] and Kazakhstan, has a very substantial military-industrial complex capable of supporting a nuclear-armed state.” The paper, written based on Woolsey’s vantage as the chief negotiator for another arms treaty at the time, further emphasized that Ukraine “has not only ICBMs, but nuclear-armed bombers.”

President Clinton’s National Security Advisor, Tony Lake, ridiculed Ukraine’s trepidation in giving up these capabilities. After receiving a Congressional delegation led by Dick Gephardt that had visited Ukraine, he summarized their request for security assurances in American legislation as “a Rodney Dangerfield problem.” Years of Ukrainian appeals in this regard sounded, to American ears, like the comedian’s bumptious assertion, “I get no respect.”

As negotiations wore on, the Clinton Administration increasingly viewed Ukrainian disarmament as a political prize. A few months after receiving input from U.S. Representatives, in October 1993, Talbott thanked Vice President Al Gore for dropping in on the Ukrainian Foreign Minister at the White House. Clinton did the same.

“If we succeed in getting those nuclear weapons out of Ukraine,” Talbott quipped to Gore, “I’ll try to arrange for one to be mounted on your wall as a trophy.”

What if Russia invades Ukraine?

The administration would score a significant prize with the signing of the Trilateral Agreement on January 14, 1994. Yet, on the way to Russia, Clinton’s delegation stopped in Kyiv, where Talbott admitted his superiors shut down eleventh-hour pleas regarding its terms by “roughing [Kravchuk] up.” Then, when Clinton’s delegation arrived in Moscow, they encountered strong Russian hostility based on the NATO Partnership for Peace (PfP) initiative. This new category of affiliation was actually proposed to cool down the discussion of NATO enlargement by succoring prospective applicants with no real chance of full membership in the alliance.

American officials prepared the talking point that it would provide “security underpinnings for countries—Ukraine, Kazakhstan—that otherwise might not be willing to give up nuclear weapons.”

But this was not enough to satisfy the Russians.

Following further spats, Clinton officials like Talbott began to accept privately that Russia would exert special influence in Central and Eastern Europe. In March 1994, he noted the necessity of responding to PfP opponents like Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev with respect for “Russia’s vital interests in the ‘near abroad.’” “It has such interests; we recognize that,” he told Christopher. “In fact,” he added, “we’re prepared to help in a variety of ways.”

Among the examples he provided was the “Trilateral Accord with Ukraine.”

Later that month, Polish Defense Minister Piotr Kołodziejczyk “emphasize[d] strongly” to Talbott that “the independence of Ukraine is of strategic importance for Poland, and not just Poland.” Noting that his own nation’s president had helped persuade Kravchuk to relent on the nuclear question—and given that Belarus, another post-Soviet republic with inherited nuclear weapons, “had already come almost totally under Russia’s control”— Kołodziejczyk emphasized that “Poland was watching to see whether the same thing would happen to Ukraine bit by bit: first Crimea, then eastern Ukraine, then the remainder.”