Nukes for nothing: The deal that broke Ukraine's trust

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30No bouncing between tabs. And best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Self-directed investing. Trading. Full-service wealth management. Automated investing. Financial planning. Thematic investing. Retirement planning. Phew. And to think, that's just a small taste of what Schwab offers. Because Schwab knows that when it comes to your finances, choice matters. No matter your goals, investing style, life stage or experience, Schwab has everything you need, all in one place, so you can invest your way.

1:11Visit schwab.com to learn more. Hey there, it's Asma and Tristan here. Hey guys, as we reach the end of 2025, we wanted to bring you a few of our favourite episodes of the podcast since we relaunched in September. That's right. And we will be back in the new year with brand new episodes bringing you stories about where the world and America meet. And in the meantime, I should say we love to hear from you all. So please drop us an email if you've got thoughts about some of the episodes we've done or questions or suggestions for future topics. Our email address is theglobalstory at bbc.com. This one is one of my absolute favorites.

1:50It is a look back on something called the Budapest Memorandum, which was a treaty signed between Ukraine, Russia and the United States back in the early 90s, back in the days when Ukraine was the world's third most powerful nuclear power. And essentially what happened was Ukraine believes that it was betrayed and the ramifications of what it sees as its betrayal are still with us today and what's making the resolution of the war in Ukraine partly so difficult to solve. It was such a good listen. And Tristan, I wasn't particularly familiar with the history of the Budapest Memorandum. And what I so enjoyed about this one was that the story was told in such a riveting way.

2:32I loved the sound. I loved the storytelling. I really enjoyed this episode. And Andrew Harding was there when all this happened and is a great guest. In all the peace talks about Ukraine, there's one phrase which keeps coming up again and again. We will talk about many important topics. The first one is security guarantees. Security guarantees, so important. Security guarantees. Security guarantees. Because when we speak about security guarantees, we speak about the whole security of the European continent. On Thursday this week, most of the major Western powers met with Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky to work out what this phrase even means.

3:14The question is, if Russia attacks again, who will actually show up to help Ukraine. It's one of the biggest things standing in the way of peace right now. And the problem is, this is exactly where Ukraine's been burnt before.

3:34Standing next to the French president on Thursday, Vladimir Zelensky said, we don't want a repeat of the Budapest memorandum. Today on the show, we go back to the last time the US promised to keep Ukraine safe. And why Ukraine doesn't trust the West anymore. From the BBC, I'm Tristan Redman, and this is The Global Story.

4:11Did you know that in the early 1990s, Ukraine was the world's third largest nuclear power? They had more warheads than France, the UK and China combined. The story we're telling today begins here, when the US and Russia tried to convince Ukraine to give up its nukes. And in the process, they might have laid the groundwork for the war we're seeing today. It all starts when the Soviet Union fell. So I arrived in Moscow in 91, just as the Soviet Union was collapsing. My colleague Andrew Harding was based there throughout the 1990s, and he's reported extensively on the war in Ukraine since 2022. At the same time, everything else was collapsing.

5:00The ruble, the currency was collapsing, the economy, everybody's sense of what a state was, what capitalism was. Everything was in utter chaos. So the memories I particularly have of pensioners who saw their savings wiped out, sitting on little stools in the snow outside metro stations, trying to sell anything they could, their heirlooms, to try to earn enough to afford a loaf of bread, which overnight had gone from something they took for granted to something astronomical.

5:41I remember you'd take taxi rides and everybody had become a taxi driver overnight. Anyone with a car was out there all day, all night, trying to earn hard currency. So you'd get a ride in some nuclear physicist's car because he was trying to earn a buck, literally a buck, because a ruble wasn't worth his time. And he certainly wasn't getting paid anything enough from the state, which really was bankrupt. Did it feel the same when you visited Ukraine? In many ways, Ukraine was even worse because Ukraine had so much of the old Soviet heavy industry, but all those industries just died almost overnight.

6:26The factories went bankrupt. So, for instance, you talk about in the West about the Great Depression, America's Great Depression. Ukraine's economic collapse was far more spectacular. Their GDP, their economic output was halved in the early 90s. That's far more than the Great Depression. Demographic collapse. People stopped having babies. People tried to leave to go abroad to find money. Extraordinary economic hardships. So in among all this chaos, there's also a perceived threat of nuclear warfare and weapons kind of getting out of control. How is Ukraine wrapped up in all that? So the West's eyes are all on Moscow, on the Kremlin, on Russia.

7:12That's where their focus is. Suddenly they wake up to the fact, we all wake up to the fact, that there's this massive country, Ukraine, that overnight is the world's third largest nuclear power. And wow, what are we going to do about that? Surely the simplest thing, given the economic problems, given the risk of political uncertainty in Ukraine is to get them, to push them, to give their weapons to Russia. There's real concern that gangsters, mafia are already stealing and selling nuclear weapons on the black market. What would happen if a nuclear warhead went missing? Better to deal with Russia, the Kremlin, get those weapons all back to Moscow, at least back to Russia, and deal with one country, then risk having all these other countries with their own nuclear weapons that they frankly can't afford to maintain and safeguard.

8:13So a recurring thing I remember in sort of films of the time was this idea that nuclear weapons in this post-Soviet space would somehow get into the wrong hands. Do you have the same memory? Yeah, so remember how forever it seemed the Soviet Union was this supply of baddies for Bond movies, for Hollywood, for villains of all sorts. Suddenly in the 90s, it's no longer the Kremlin. It's breakaway factions. It's bad generals who had somehow grabbed power in some former Soviet state, threatening to sell nuclear weapons on the black market. I remember James Bond having to go to St. Petersburg. So it was very much embracing and reflecting this idea that people saw that a fragmented post-Soviet space as being a real mine of drama and danger and risk.

9:14Gentlemen, I have a plan. And I think it becomes such a trope that it's even satirized in Austin Powers. It's come to my attention that a breakaway Russian republic, Krepulakistan, is about to transfer a nuclear warhead to the United Nations in a few days. Here's the plan. Dr. Evil comes up with a plan to hijack some nuclear weapons from a so-called breakaway Soviet republic called Krepulakistan. And he's going to hijack the nuclear weapons and hold the world to ransom. We hold the world ransom for$100 billion. So it's kind of easy to forget how big a fear it was at the time. I mean, what about in Ukraine?

9:59Is there consensus on what Ukraine needs to do about these nuclear weapons? Not at all, no, because, well, of course, they've gone through the experience, the trauma of Chernobyl, of the nuclear disaster there. There'd also been many other nuclear disasters in places like Chelyabinsk, in the Urals, in Kazakhstan and elsewhere. So Soviet citizens were well aware of the risks of nuclear contamination, of nuclear war. But there are plenty of Ukrainian politicians in parliament going, we'd be mad to give these nuclear weapons back, or at least mad to give all of them back. Surely we can keep a third or a portion of these weapons because who knows what's going to happen in the future.

10:44There are plenty of people already in the early 90s who are starting to see Russia as a long-term rival. It's already clear that there's going to be a struggle over what happens with Crimea. The problem is that Ukraine was not in a strong negotiating position, not with Russia, particularly not with the West, because it was bankrupt. It needed the IMF. It needed America to help it. And it wasn't in a position to negotiate, to bargain really hard to keep those weapons. And in the end, the Americans played pretty hardball with the Ukrainians and made them give up those weapons. So the Americans are pushing the Ukrainians to give up the nuclear weapons.

11:35You've got a kind kind of years-long process of diplomacy in the early 90s, which comes to a head in 1994. Can you tell us what you remember about that process and how they got to an eventual agreement in Budapest? So there are a couple of moments that really kind of paint the picture of the negotiations that led to the Budapest Memorandum. One of them takes place in winter at the airport in Kyiv and President Bill Clinton arrives. He's on a sort of urgent mission because the Ukrainians are starting to get cold feet. They're thinking, well, maybe we need safeguards. Maybe we can find a way to keep at least a portion of these weapons for ourselves.

12:19Bill Clinton arrives. He flies in. But although he's famously good at his personal diplomacy, Bill Clinton doesn't play it very well. He leaves the Ukrainian president standing for, I think it's 12 minutes on the tarmac, very cold weather, before he actually emerges from his plane. Later, there's a press conference. And now the best thing for us to do is to wish Mr. President Clinton bon voyage. And Ukraine's president has handled the press quite well. And Bill Clinton makes a quip about, well, perhaps you could come back and be my press secretary. Let me say this in closing. If he did not have such a very important job, I would invite President Kravchuk to the United States to run my press conferences.

13:10Lightheart is banter, but it makes all the front pages of the Ukrainian press the next day. And it's seen as Bill Clinton not treating Ukraine as a big, important sovereign state. Okay, so what's the second scene? The second scene is in a dacha, one of these cottages, if you like, in the woods outside Moscow. It's the sort of place that a lot of the deals that ended the Soviet Union took place in. It's somewhere that foreign dignitaries are always brought to for a bit of drinking, a bit of Russian hospitality. and even though Russia is in a mess, Boris Yeltsin in particular can put on a good show.

13:59Officially the talk is of business-like new partnership, but a private reception last night at Boris Yeltsin's country retreat near Moscow revealed a touch of genuine warmth between the two presidents. There happened to be a saxophone on hand because of course Russian diplomats knew that Bill Clinton played the saxophone and so there it was. They ate moose lips, which is a Russian delicacy. And the implication here was that Yeltsin was trying to do a deal directly with Clinton over the heads of Ukraine. President Clinton and President Yeltsin have signed an agreement in Moscow this morning, paving the way for the dismantling of Ukraine's nuclear arsenal.

14:42And there was frustration there in Ukraine that the Americans, the Western world, seemed to go along with that, that they automatically just treated the Kremlin as the inheritor of all that power. So it sounds like there's a kind of discrepancy in how Russia is treated in this negotiation and how Ukraine is treated. Despite all that, what is it that gets Ukraine over the line and gets them to agree to sign this deal? What do they get in return for it? They get money and they get security assurances in the form of a memorandum signed later in 1994, in December 94, in Budapest, the Budapest Memorandum.

15:32It's a document that appears to offer Ukraine concrete assurances that neither Russia nor America nor Britain will ever threaten Ukraine's territorial integrity once it's handed over its nuclear weapons. In other words, do the right thing, become a non-nuclear power, to be a brave, bold step for a newly independent country, renounce nuclear weapons after the horrors of Chernobyl. and in return, your borders, including Crimea, will be sacrosanct and the combined power of Western assurances and Russian assurances will mean you're safe.

16:28Coming up, what happens when they break their promise?

17:05Andrew Harding:We'll be right back. TV catches up. Come on! Get a load of this guy. Catch up. On a dog. Yeah, we've got thoughts. Too loud? In Chicago, you're gonna hear it. Because nothing here gets built without conversation. Nothing moves without connection. So, if you think you know AT &T, it might be time to rethink that. Because their network has improved, like, a lot. So Chicago can keep speaking its mind with AT &T Wireless and AT &T Fiber. Chicago won't stop talking. Our improved network backs it up. AT &T, connecting, changes, everything. AT &T Fiber, limited availability in select areas.

17:46So what is it that the Americans actually believe that they have signed up to? The Americans believe they signed up to something that means Ukraine will get money from the West. They will give their nuclear weapons back to Russia. And in return, there is an understanding from the international community as well as Russia that Ukraine's new post-independence borders are sacrosanct, that Russia is committed to not breaching those borders, that it will respect them. The problem is that the consequences are never spelled out. So yes, there are assurances from the West, security assurances, but they are never clear cut.

18:33On the language, there's a story about a discrepancy in understanding and the actual use of the word guarantee in the Budapest memorandum. I wonder if that's something you've come across. So in the final document, the word used in Russian and in Ukrainian is basically guarantee. but the English translation of that was assurances. And the drafters of the document were very clear to the Russians, to the Ukrainians, that as far as the West was concerned, it wasn't a security guarantee that they were offering because that would be like Article 5 of NATO, that it would require military assistance. So an ironclad commitment to come to your defense.

19:16This was sort of second tier level. there would be consequences, unspecified, but it was assurances. And to some extent, it was linguistic. Simply the translation in Russian and Ukrainian sounded more like guarantees. They didn't have a word for assurances. And so there was a sort of room for confusion there. For the United States, after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and then the full invasion in 2022. Do the Americans hold up their end of the deal or do they renege on it? Well, you could say that they've held up their end of the deal because they've been supplying Ukraine with vast amounts of weaponry to try and resist Russian aggression.

20:03That's not the same as guaranteeing their security and sending troops in to reclaim Ukraine's lost territory, but it's something. So Russia goes from being a theoretical threat to Ukraine to an actual physical threat. At this point, they've kind of clearly broken the Budapest memorandum they signed in 1994. What's their justification for doing this? There are multiple explanations that the Russians, that the Kremlin has given over the years for why it sees the Budapest memorandum as not being an obstacle, shall we say. But the bottom line in all of this, you know, one can talk about the niceties, the legalities, But I was at a summit meeting in Cape Town and Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, was there.

20:54And I remember sitting in a conference hall waiting for a press conference. And I was sitting next to a member of the Russian delegation. And we talked for about an hour. And this woman went through all of those excuses for the Ukrainian invasion. This was after Russia had invaded Ukraine in 2022. She went through all of those excuses. And I kept going, yeah, but 1994, Budapest Memorandum. And every time she'd go, no, no, no, come up with another reason. I'd go, yeah, but you signed that. And finally, she went, it's just a piece of paper. And there you have it. Fundamentally, it's just a piece of paper.

21:39Vladimir Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, seems to disagree with the idea that the Americans have held up their end of the deal. There's a very well-known American podcaster of Ukrainian and Russian heritage called Lex Friedman. The following is a conversation with Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine. And in January this year, Zelensky went on his podcast and he talked about this. He brings up the Budapest Memorandum. We sent letters to all security guarantors, to all members of the Budapest Memorandum. Everyone must meet urgently. Did anyone come, you ask? No. Did anyone reply to these letters?

22:22No. And why not? None of them gave a damn about this country, these people, these security guarantees, etc. The question is simple about Budapest. Can we trust this? No. Whichever country out of these five sat at the negotiating table, just a piece of paper. This audio, Lex Friedman, whose podcast it is, he's very into AI stuff. So it's actually an AI translation, which is why Zelensky sounds like that. He repeats the phrase that you mentioned. It's just a piece of paper. The Budapest Mirandum is just a piece of paper. I just wondered what your reaction was to all this. there's an element of truth to the western realpolitik here the budapest memorandum is dead and buried to some extent the americans are simply recognizing reality there's no point in haggling over the details of the budapest memorandum an old piece of paper now that Putin has completely upended the global rules-based order.

23:28The focus has to be surely on containing this threat militarily. Given what they've done, given the total contempt they've shown for anything like a rules-based order, what's the point in wasting time on something that is to everybody now a piece of history. Well, Bill Clinton says that he regrets that piece of history. So he, reflecting back on his involvement in the Budapest memorandum, he questions whether or not Russia would have invaded Ukraine in 2014 and then again in 2022 if Ukraine had still had nuclear weapons. I feel terrible about it because Ukraine is a very important country And I feel a personal stake because I got them to agree to give up their nuclear weapons.

24:22And none of them believe that Russia would have pulled this stunt if Ukraine still had their weapons. Do you agree with that? Do you think the United States sort of effectively neutered Ukraine by taking its nukes away? It's easy, isn't it, in retrospect, to say, of course, if Ukraine had done X, Y and Z and America as well, that things would have been different, probably. But those kind of simple revisionist observations ignore, or often tend to ignore, the realities at the time when decisions were made, the problems, the economic problems facing Ukraine, the sense of instability, of political instability, the pressure, the sense that now is an opportunity too big to waste, and that Ukraine without nuclear weapons was a worthwhile piece of geopolitical maneuvering.

25:27The bottom line is, the future is unpredictable. And you can make a deal in good conscience, You can write language that works then. But when somebody comes into power who doesn't respect those treaties, who doesn't respect the rules-based order, then what do you do? Well, they're trying to make a deal again now. What would a serious security guarantee even look like at this stage? For Ukraine? Yeah. A security guarantee is a very powerful Ukrainian military. That, I think, is the bottom line for them. Fundamentally, this is not a territorial war for Ukraine or for Russia. This is about freedom and security.

26:19Ukraine wants freedom. Ukraine wants security. Russia wants to deny Ukraine freedom and security. and that's the key to understand not just what's going on now but how you get out of this and so the for the ukrainians this is not a war that can be ended with a peace deal with russia certainly not at this stage because i think even if ukraine were now somehow to win back its territory, its lost territory, to defeat Russia, even to see perhaps the fall of Putin in the aftermath of that, Ukraine would have no reason to believe in a peace treaty with a weakened Russia. It would assume that Russia will now just bide its time, build up its forces and wait to strike again.

27:11The thing that I find interesting here is that both heads of states, Zelensky and Putin have essentially said that the Budapest memorandum is just a piece of paper. All treaties in some sense are just a piece of paper. They've just kind of been imbued with some greater significance. But if we've got to a situation where we've kind of lost the illusion that a treaty is a treaty and means something, have we lost the sense that a diplomatic solution can ever be possible. We're in a situation where I think a treaty between Ukraine and Russia is complicated, isn't it? I mean, at some stage, diplomacy, a treaty might play a role, but we are in the realms now of pure military conflict.

28:07I don't think Ukraine sees its security anymore as something that anybody else can guarantee. I think Ukraine has come to understand the hard way that ultimately only it can look after itself. And that's why it's fighting. I certainly think that they want the West to help and that they are playing along, for instance, with these negotiations in the hope that that will keep Keep West engaged, keep Trump in his capricious moods engaged and supplying as much weaponry as possible. But I don't think the Ukrainians can afford to leave their security in anybody else's hands anymore. And I think they've come to understand that.

28:52And which is why I particularly don't think that they see any real negotiated end to this with Russia.

29:06I think if there's a deal to be done, the Ukrainians see it as a deal, temporary, long-term, whatever, between the West, Europe and Ukraine. I don't think they see that there is the possibility of anything being signed or agreed to with Russia that is worth the paper it's written on.

29:46Andrew, thank you so much. Thank you.