Pushing for an invitation to join NATO, Ukraine on Dec. 3 criticized a decades-old agreement under which the country gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for security that, it says, never materialized.
Kyiv wants NATO members to invite the country to join the bloc at a meeting of the alliance’s foreign ministers that starts on Tuesday, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine grinds toward its three-year mark and Russia makes battlefield gains.
Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs cited the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which saw Kyiv relinquish the third-largest nuclear arsenal on the planet in return for security assurances, including from Moscow, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“Today, the Budapest Memorandum is a monument to short-sightedness in strategic security decision-making,” the ministry wrote in a statement, ahead of the 3o-year-anniversary of the memorandum’s signing on Dec 5.
The statement added that the agreement “should serve as a reminder to the current leaders of the Euro-Atlantic community that building a European security architecture at the expense of Ukraine’s interests, rather than taking them into consideration, is destined to failure.”
Ukraine has publically lamented the memorandum since 2014, when Moscow’s troops annexed the Crimean peninsula.
The fighting in the east, which resulted in thousands of deaths, came to a tentative pause under what was known as the Minsk agreements.
This fell apart in 2022, when Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February of that year.
As Ukraine approaches three years of war with Russia, Kyiv has resisted the notion of a return to similar negotiations that may result in a temporary cease-fire.
“Enough of the Budapest Memorandum. Enough of the Minsk Agreements. Twice is enough, we cannot fall into the same trap a third time. We simply have no right to do so,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said previously.
Kyiv is calling for robust security guarantees and admittance into the NATO alliance.
The foreign ministry’s statement called on Washington and London, both signatories to the Budapest Memorandum, as well as Paris and Beijing—which Kyiv says also backed the memorandum—to support the provision of security guarantees to Ukraine.
“We are convinced that the only real guarantee of security for Ukraine, as well as a deterrent to further Russian aggression against Ukraine and other states, is Ukraine’s full membership in NATO,” it said.
Russia regards the notion of Ukraine joining NATO as an intolerable security threat, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly labeled the organization’s expansion “provocative.”
New NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte avoided several questions on the matter of Ukraine potentially joining the alliance during a press conference in Brussels on Tuesday.
