Trump says Ukraine’s nuclear weapons belonged to Russia: is it true?
26 March 09:25
The nuclear weapons that remained in Ukraine after the collapse of the USSR actually belonged to Russia. This statement was made by the US Special Representative of the President Richard Grenell, Komersant ukrainskyi reports.
“Let’s be clear about the Budapest Memorandum: the nuclear weapons were Russian remnants. Ukraine gave the nukes back to Russia. It was not Ukrainian. This is an inconvenient fact,”
– he wrote in X.
He was responded to by former US Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer.
“I helped draft the Budapest Memorandum. Grenell is absolutely wrong. The nuclear warheads in Ukraine were Soviet, not Russian. The warheads were in the sole custody of Ukraine. Intercontinental ballistic missiles and bombers were eliminated in Ukraine, except for a small number sent to Russia to write off debts,”
– the diplomat wrote.
He added that the small number of warheads that were sent to Russia were also sent for elimination. And Ukraine was doing this largely because Russia had pledged to respect its sovereignty and territorial integrity and not to use force against it.
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Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament and the Budapest Memorandum
After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Ukraine inherited the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world. It had between 1,514 and 2,156 strategic nuclear warheads and 2,800 to 4,200 tactical nuclear weapons on its territory. This constituted a significant part of the nuclear potential of the former Soviet Union, making Ukraine a de facto nuclear power.
In 1992, the process of nuclear disarmament began: tactical nuclear weapons were promptly moved to Russia for destruction, and in May of that year the last echelon of them arrived at Russian plants. The issue of strategic nuclear weapons remained open: The United States insisted on its elimination, while Russia demanded that it be transferred under its control.
In 1994, Ukraine finally gave up its strategic nuclear weapons in exchange for international security guarantees. on December 5, 1994, the Memorandum on Security Assurances in connection with Ukraine’s accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons was signed in Budapest. It was signed on behalf of their respective countries by the leaders of Ukraine(Leonid Kuchma), Russia(Boris Yeltsin), the United States(Bill Clinton), and the United Kingdom(John Major).
According to the memorandum, the signatories provided Ukraine with guarantees of independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity, pledging to refrain from the threat or use of force and economic pressure. In return, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons, most of which were destroyed on its territory and the remaining warheads were transferred to Russia for disposal. The denuclearization process was completed in 1996, when Ukraine officially became a non-nuclear weapon state.
After Russia’s aggression in 2014, a separate topic of discussion was the discrepancies in the text of the memorandum. The Ukrainian translation of the document refers to “security guarantees,” but the English-language original uses the term “assurances,” which means “assurances” rather than legally binding guarantees. It turns out that none of the signatories has made firm commitments to protect Ukraine. This was the reason both for criticism of the decisions of the Ukrainian government in the early 1990s, which actually exchanged nuclear status for declarative promises without a mechanism for implementation, and for criticism of the signatories to the memorandum.
