Why Did Ukraine Give Up Its Nukes? It’s Complicated

Well, that’s terrifying. We always see images of the gentle launch of missiles gracefully arc through the sky, but an ICBM re-entry looks decidedly violent. This is a recently cleared photo of the reentry of an unarmed Minuteman III ICBM by the US Army Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC). Public domain

Since Russia invaded in 2022, I’ve heard numerous people say that Ukraine should have never given up its nukes when the Soviet Union collapsed. “Putin wouldn’t have dared invade if Ukraine had nuclear weapons!”

But this argument is a little more nuanced than that.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Ukraine briefly had the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal.

In January 1994, Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin pressured Ukraine to dismantle its nuclear weapons. The missiles had once been controlled by the Soviet Union but were still on the soil of the newly independent Ukrainian nation.

In fact, the nuclear disarmament of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine should be considered one of the great success stories of the end of the Cold War. It was one of the most significant victories for the cause of nonproliferation.

But after Russia’s most recent invasion of Ukraine in 2022, several politicians and talking heads have said that Ukraine should have never given up their inherited nuclear arsenal — the idea being that Putin would have never invaded Crimea in 2014, and definitely not Ukraine proper in 2022, if Ukraine was still a nuclear-armed nation.