![]() President Bill Clinton in Moscow on January 14, 1994. The trilateral discussions accelerated in December, producing the Trilateral Statement and accompanying annex, signed by Kravchuk, Yelstin and U.S. participation, the Russians because they understood that Washington shared their goal of getting the nuclear weapons out of Ukraine, the Ukrainians because they believed that, with American officials engaged in the process, they would have a friend in court and could achieve a deal that better answered their four key questions. Both the Russians and Ukrainians welcomed U.S. ![]() Originally agnostic as to how the question would be resolved-as the result of a bilateral Ukrainian-Russian negotiation or of a process involving the United States-Washington concluded in the aftermath of the Massandra summit that it would have to become more directly involved in brokering a solution. The first trilateral meeting of American, Russian and Ukrainian diplomats took place in August 1993. Washington wanted the nuclear warheads transferred to Russia but was sympathetic to some of the Ukrainian government’s concerns and actively discussed the issue-and related questions such as compensation and security assurances-separately with both sides from early 1992 on. agenda with that country in its first years of independence. Getting the nuclear weapons out of Ukraine topped the U.S. The bilateral deal, however, collapsed almost immediately. The September 1993 Massandra summit between Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk and Russian President Boris Yeltsin initially appeared to have achieved a formula for the transfer of the strategic nuclear warheads to Russia and the resolution of all ancillary issues. They began to identify solutions to some questions but never successfully came to closure. How, where and under what conditions would the strategic nuclear warheads, ICBMs and bombers be eliminated?īilateral Ukrainian-Russian negotiations grappled with these issues in the months after the fall of the Soviet Union.Eliminating the intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), ICBM silos, strategic bombers and nuclear infrastructure in Ukraine would be an expensive proposition at a time when the new Ukrainian economy was sharply contracting who would cover the costs of those eliminations?.The strategic nuclear warheads had commercial value in the form of the highly-enriched uranium (HEU) they contained, which could be blended down into low-enriched uranium (LEU) and used in fuel rods for nuclear power reactors how would Ukraine ensure that it received the value of the HEU in the nuclear warheads on its territory?.Possession of nuclear weapons was seen to confer certain security benefits what guarantees or assurances would there be for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity after it gave up strategic nuclear arms?.Among other things, the Ukrainian government wanted acceptable answers to four key questions: The process with Ukraine proved more difficult, as Kyiv sought to achieve particular objectives before giving up what was then the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Moscow also in relatively short order reached bilateral understandings with Belarus and Kazakhstan on the removal or elimination of the strategic nuclear weapon systems on the territory of those countries. Moscow quickly secured the return of all tactical nuclear warheads to Russia during the first half of 1992. Soviet tactical nuclear weapons were even more widely scattered. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left Soviet strategic nuclear weapons-both strategic nuclear warheads and delivery systems-located on the territory of four newly independent states: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine. Steven Pifer recounts the history of this unique negotiation and describes the key lessons learned. In return, Ukraine received security assurances from the United States, Russia and Britain compensation for the economic value of the highly-enriched uranium in the warheads (which could be blended down and converted into fuel for nuclear reactors) and assistance from the United States in dismantling the missiles, missile silos, bombers and nuclear infrastructure on its territory. The result was the Trilateral Statement, signed in January 1994, under which Ukraine agreed to transfer the nuclear warheads to Russia for elimination. government engaged in a trilateral process with Ukraine and Russia. When Ukrainian-Russian negotiations on removing these weapons from Ukraine appeared to break down in September 1993, the U.S. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Ukraine had the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal on its territory.
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