As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine enters its fifth day, what is for certain is that the geopolitical repercussions will be felt far away from the European operational theater. Ukraine’s grim fate may well have long-term implications for future nuclear disarmament efforts, including in the Middle East. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Ukraine gained its independence. Along with Belarus and Kazakhstan, Ukraine inherited a huge arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles, bombers and, more crucially, nuclear warheads, which it gave up.
The government of former president Leonid Kravchuk agreed in 1994 to completely dismantle that arsenal, one of the largest in the world at the time, as part of the Budapest Memorandum, which included security assurances for protecting Ukraine’s territorial integrity and political independence in return. The full title of that agreement was the Memorandum on security assurances in connection with Ukraine’s accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Despite all this, Russian tanks are now rolling into Kyiv to topple Ukraine’s democratically elected government, ostensibly for its pro-Western orientation. Ukraine, which aspires to be a member of both the EU and the NATO, is receiving insufficient support and assistance from Western countries to stop the Russian military juggernaut. Some argue that former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi made a similar mistake when he surrendered his substantial stockpile of weapons of mass destruction to the West in 2003, only to be toppled by, and killed in, a popular armed uprising that was given decisive NATO air support less than a decade later.
Ukraine, however, could set a precedent altogether different from serial human rights-violating pariah states such as Gaddafi’s Libya, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or North Korea. It is a democratic and genuinely pro-Western country. If the West cannot guarantee Kyiv’s security in return for furthering the campaign for nuclear disarmament, then why would unpopular, nondemocratic governments put their trust in similar security assurances in return for dismantling their stockpiles (or pledging to never develop such weapons) in the future?
In return for surrendering his weapons of mass destruction stockpile, Gaddafi was promised better relations between Libya, then an impoverished pariah state, and the West, as well as the lifting of economic sanctions against his country. Now, the West’s collective failure to match its words with action, in the case of a country as like-minded and globally integrated as Ukraine, could serve to further reduce the already unlikely prospect that Pyongyang would ever seriously consider nuclear disarmament in return for international guarantees and sanctions relief.
Could the Ukraine fiasco also impact the ongoing negotiations between Iran and the international community to revive the 2015 nuclear accord? Iran now has an estimated nuclear breakout time as short as five weeks, meaning it could build a bomb in that time frame if it decides to do so. It is unclear if the undoubted failure of the Budapest Memorandum has further convinced some in Tehran that restoring the JCPOA is a futile endeavor. Orton, for one, is highly skeptical that the Ukraine crisis has, or will have, any significant bearing on Iran’s decision making vis-a-vis its nuclear program. It is important to note that if Iran ultimately does opt to develop nuclear weapons, it may not only use them to entrench the regime’s power and deter external threats.
