With the world watching, Ukraine pays a heavy price for its misplaced trust in American guarantees.
|
Listen To This Story
 |
After President Donald Trump’s much-publicized 2 1/2-hour-long phone call with Vladimir Putin apparently produced little or nothing, Trump and Vice President JD Vance appear ready to walk away from any further involvement in Ukraine. So much for Trump’s repeated boast that he could end the war in a single day.
Trump’s new position not only holds Ukraine responsible for Russia’s attacks but also contends that there’s no real reason for US involvement in what is basically a foreign affair that the US has little or nothing to do with.
Needless to say, Ukrainians saw Trump’s performance as less than inspiring.
“The memorandum that came out of it is a pretext to drag the talks on forever,” said Boris Bondarev, a former Russian diplomat who quit his post after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. “There is no time frame mentioned,” Bondarev added. “No one commits to anything.”
“Putin is counting on the weaknesses in Trump’s character to implement his plan,” said Lt. Gen. Ihor Romanenko, a former deputy chief of staff of Ukraine’s armed forces.
Trump’s recent threats to simply walk away from Ukraine ignore the fact that Washington, along with Great Britain and Moscow, signed an agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum in 1994 that promised Ukraine protection in exchange for relinquishing the Soviet-era arsenal that Moscow had manufactured and stockpiled on Ukraine’s territory.
That arsenal included deadly biological weapons that Moscow had been developing in Ukrainian laboratories, as well as nuclear weapons and tons of more conventional weapons that the US wanted to prevent falling into the wrong hands. Ukraine, only too happy to escape the Kremlin’s colonialist stranglehold over its affairs, readily agreed. After all, the US was the leader of the free world and the guarantor of democracy. Its word was as good as gold.
The Budapest Memorandum led to what came to be known as the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) agreement, which was shepherded through Congress by Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Sam Nunn (D-GA), who was a major figure on the Armed Services Committee. Culminating in more than a year of intense negotiations, the effort finally produced concrete results.
In 2005, Lugar and Illinois freshman Sen. Barack Obama, who had taken the oath of office only seven months earlier, flew to Ukraine to check the progress on dismantling of the Soviet equipment. Instead of preparing to destroy the West, Ukraine had put a maximum effort into obliterating a massive amount of Soviet weaponry. “All we did for months on end was take apart artillery pieces, tanks, and armored personnel carriers,” recalls Oleksiy Ryabinin, a 45-year-old construction worker who had been conscripted into Ukraine’s army to help dismantle the Soviet equipment.
Although Lugar and Obama were in Ukraine primarily to verify the elimination of the Soviet weapons stockpile, they also managed to secure an agreement that prevented a string of Ukrainian research labs from sending dangerous biological pathogens to Russia for potential use in weapons of mass destruction. The laboratories had been part of a Cold War network of “anti-plague” labs. They were intended to equip the Soviets with samples of untreatable diseases that could eventually be weaponized for use against the West in case of a major war.
The US subsequently provided funding for the laboratories to both upgrade their security and to redirect their effort to stopping the spread of disease. The major American concern had been that a terrorist organization might get access to a loosely guarded deadly pathogen.
After a stopover in London on their return trip to Washington, Lugar and Obama asked Congress for additional funding to accelerate the destruction of more than 400,000 small arms, 1,000 anti-aircraft missiles, and more than 15,000 tons of ammunition.
In the end, Lugar’s office reported that the CTR process had resulted in the destruction or deactivation of 6,760 nuclear warheads, 587 intercontinental ballistic missiles, 483 ICBM silos, 32 ICBM mobile missile launchers, 150 bombers, 789 nuclear air-to-surface missiles, 436 submarine missile launchers, 549 submarine-launched missiles, 28 nuclear submarines, and 194 nuclear test tunnels.
The main concern from Washington’s point of view was always that in the chaos following Ukraine’s breakaway from Moscow, the former Soviet arsenal, which was only haphazardly guarded, might fall into the wrong hands. The investment in Ukraine seemed like an inexpensive alternative to World War III.
The understanding was that Ukraine would agree to disarm itself in return for the US and Western Europe’s promise to protect it from future Russian incursions. That guarantee faded when Russia seized Crimea in 2014. It was apparently completely overlooked by Trump and Vance, both of whom seem more inclined to be generous towards the Kremlin than to Western interests.
Even if Trump now decides to abandon Ukraine, it is worth remembering that at a different time, not so long ago, a guarantee from America actually meant something. And that in contrast to the current president’s empty promise to end a massive conflict in a single day, members of the US Congress were actually able to accomplish quite a lot. They kept the world safe. These days, that seems a frighteningly low priority.
