Twenty years ago, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees from Russia and the West. Today Kyiv feels betrayed - and not merely by Moscow, reports GHN based on DW.
Until recently, the existence of a decades-old Ukraine security guarantee was known only by security experts and some politicians.
But ever since the Russian annexation of Crimea, Ukraine is now, more than ever recalling that so-called Budapest Memorandum.
The document was signed on 5 December, 1994 at the summit of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). In it, Ukraine, a nuclear power at that time, voluntarily gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees.
The US, Great Britain and Russia welcomed the decision of the Kyiv regime to accede to the non-proliferation agreement and pledged, among other things, to respect the independence and "existing borders" of Ukraine.
The Soviet Union, Belarus and Kazakhstan signed similar memoranda on the same day.
Twenty years ago, the Budapest Memorandum marked the end of many years of negotiations between the successor states of the Soviet Union and leading Western nuclear powers. Ukraine had a special place in the talks.
After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the eastern European country inherited 176 strategic and more than 2,500 tactical nuclear missiles. Ukraine at that point had the third-largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world after the United States and Russia.
But Leonid Kravchuk, then the president of Ukraine, told DW that was only formally the case. De facto, Kyiv was powerless.
"All the control systems were in Russia. The so-called black suitcase with the start button, that was with Russian president Boris Yeltsin."