Boris Yeltsin, left, Bill Clinton, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, and British Prime Minister John Major sign the Budapest Memorandum on December 5, 1994. (Photo: Brookings Institution)
Ukraine gave Russia all its nuclear weapons in 1994 in exchange for a promise that they would never be invaded.
The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances comprises four substantially identical political agreements signed at the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) in Budapest, Hungary, on 5 December 1994, to provide security assurances by its signatories relating to the accession of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The four memoranda were originally signed by four nuclear powers: Ukraine, Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. France and China gave individual assurances in separate documents.
Ukraine had the third-largest nuclear arsenal on earth—larger than Britain, France, and China combined.
About 1,900 strategic warheads, in addition to 2,500 tactical warheads already deployed in 1991 and 1992.
176 intercontinental ballistic missiles. 44 strategic bombers.
Most of these missiles were in Ukrainian silos, aimed at the United States.
And Ukraine didn’t just stockpile them—the SS-18 and SS-24 were designed and built at the Pivdenmash plant in Dnipro.
The president who signed off on the entire arsenal, Leonid Kuchma, used to run the plant. Every warhead went back to Russia. The last two trains crossed the border on June 1, 1996.
By 2001, the missile silos had been blown up. By 2006, the last bomber had been cut into pieces.
Russia invaded anyway.