What is the Budapest Memorandum, which has not given Ukraine security guarantees
Ukraine has not received security guarantees in exchange for the renunciation of nuclear weapons and will currently demand concrete decisions from the guarantor states of the Budapest Memorandum.
This was stated by President Volodymyr Zelensky on February 19 in a speech at a security conference in Munich.
If there are no such decisions in the near future, Ukraine believes that it does not work, and all the 1994 agreements are called into question.
This is not the first attempt by the Ukrainian authorities to appeal to the guarantor countries of the Budapest Memorandum and remind them of the violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty. According to Zelensky, there have been three such attempts in the history of the document. Now the authorities are trying to gather such consultations for the fourth and past time.
What is the Budapest Memorandum and why does it not work? BBC News Ukraine recalls the main points of the document and the history of its signing.
What the Budapest Memorandum is about
The memorandum on security guarantees was signed in December 1994 in Budapest, hence the title of the document. This happened after Ukraine’s accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
The Budapest Memorandum was signed by US President Bill Clinton, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma and British Prime Minister John Major.
According to the document, Kyiv abandoned its nuclear arsenal, which at the time was the third largest in the world after the United States and Russia.
Instead, the United States, Russia, and Germany took on the following responsibilities:
- respect the independence, sovereignty and current borders of Ukraine,
- refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine,
- refrain from economic pressure that could violate Ukraine’s sovereignty.
In Ukraine, this document was perceived as one of the tools of guarantee security from the world’s most powerful players.
Nuclear power of Ukraine
By 1996, Ukraine had fulfilled its responsibilities: it had destroyed 2,000 strategic nuclear warheads inherited from the USSR.
Despite the fact that Ukraine’s nuclear arsenal was called the third largest in the world, this moment was formal, said the first President of Ukraine Leonid Kravchuk.
“All missile control systems, headquarters were in Russia, President Boris Yeltsin had a black roller with a launch button,” – to consider Kravchuk in an interview with Deutsche Welle in 2011.
Although the launch vehicles were manufactured at the Pivdenmash plant in Dnipro, nuclear warheads were created in Russia.
And in Ukraine in the early 1990s, according to the former president, there was simply no money to support its own production of warheads and their maintenance – it cost $ 65 billion, and the treasury was empty.
Another Ukrainian president, Leonid Kuchma, who signed the document in Budapest, admitted in 2009 that he had been told about the emptiness of the memorandum after it was signed.
“Then-French President Francois Mitterrand said, ‘Son, I do not believe this document, you have been deceived,'” Kuchma told an international conference in Jerusalem.
The memorandum does not work
After the annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in Donbass in 2014, Kyiv has repeatedly stated that Russia has violated this international agreement. But Ukraine criticizes not only Moscow, but also the way it supports its commitments and other signatories.
However, representatives of the United States and the United Kingdom said they had used part of the memorandum.
Affairs, former US Ambassador to Ukraine, expert of the Brookings Institution think tank on nuclear disarmament Stephen Pifer in 2018 I saidthat according to the memorandum, Ukraine received non-guarantees, and confidence in it and that there is a difference between these concepts.
Both diplomats and experts have repeatedly stated that the Budapest Memorandum as an instrument of security and sovereignty of Ukraine does not work.
After the annexation of Crimea, Foreign Minister Volodymyr Ohryzko said that it was not just Ukraine: the non-implementation of the Budapest Memorandum undermined the principles of common European security, and the main principle of international law was that agreements should be implemented.
Presidential poll
The president’s office was convinced that Ukraine needs the domestic support of its citizens in order to raise the issue of fulfillment of their responsibilities by all signatories of the Budapest Memorandum at the international level.
Therefore, on election day, October 25, 2020, at the initiative of the President, a nationwide poll was held on five issues.
Among other Green questions from voters is whether Ukraine needs to raise the issue of the use of security guarantees set out in the Budapest Memorandum at the international level.
According to its results, 74.2% of respondents supported the right of Ukraine to use security guarantees to restore its state sovereignty and territorial integrity. Only 17.2% were against.
In the President’s Office then emphasizedthat this is not the position of one of the political teams in Ukraine, but may be a national position.
“Our state needs a mandate from the people in order to appeal to the signatories of the memorandum to fulfill their obligations,” the OP said.