Under Budapest Agreement, Russia Is Supposed To Respect Ukraine's Territory

The United States is committed to defend Ukraine to prevent Russian President Vladimir Putin from trashing the 1994 Budapest Agreement that led to the dismantling of 1,900 nuclear warheads in Kiev’s arsenal in exchange for guarantees that its territorial integrity would be respected by the US, United Kingdom, and Russia.

Photo Insert: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks with British Foreign Secretary William Hague and Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Deshchytsia after hosting the Budapest Memorandum Ministerial on the Ukraine crisis in Paris, France, on March 5, 2014.

Since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine on the basis of the so-called consent of ethnic Russians in the region, the US has provided Ukraine with $3 billion in reform and military assistance and $3 billion in loan guarantees.

US troops in western Ukraine train their Ukrainian colleagues. Washington, in concert with the European Union (EU), has taken steps to isolate Moscow politically and imposed a series of economic and visa sanctions on Russia and Russians.

“The furor over President Donald Trump’s sordid bid to extort the president of Ukraine into investigating his potential 2020 political opponent raises an obvious question: Why should the US care so much about Ukraine, a country 5,000 miles away? A big part of the reason is that US officials told the Ukrainians the US would care when negotiating the Budapest Memorandum on security assurances signed in 1994,” wrote analyst Steven Pifer on Dec. 5, 2019.

In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the US, Russia, and Britain committed “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and “to refrain from the threat or use of force” against the country. Those assurances played a key role in persuading the Ukrainian government in Kiev to give up what amounted to the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, consisting of some 1,900 strategic nuclear warheads.

Eliminating the strategic nuclear warheads, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and strategic bombers in Ukraine was a big deal for Washington. The ICBMs and bombers carried warheads of monstrous size — all designed, built, and deployed to attack America.

The warheads atop the SS-19 and SS-24 ICBMs in Ukraine had explosive yields of 400-550 kilotons each — that is, 27 to 37 times the size of the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima.

The 1,900 strategic nuclear warheads — more than six times the number of nuclear warheads that China currently possesses — could have destroyed every US city with a population of more than 50,000 three times over, with warheads left to spare.

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