By Dmitri Lascaris, Website, 1/2/23

Just about every time Western media interview a Western soldier who has fought in the Ukraine war, we hear accounts of the war that diverge radically from the narrative peddled by Western leaders and pro-NATO think tanks. Their narrative is that Ukraine is winning a war being fought for democracy and freedom, and that those who stand with the Ukrainian state are the good guys, while those who oppose it are the bad guys.

That narrative simply cannot be reconciled with accounts from the battlefield.

A case in point is “Trapped in the Trenches of Ukraine”, published by The New Yorker on December 26, 2022. The article was authored by war correspondent Luke Mogelson, who interviewed numerous members of Ukraine’s International Legion.

One of his sources was a Canadian Army veteran who survived a Russian missile attack on the International Center for Peacekeeping and Security in Yavoriv, Ukraine, a town that sits 10 miles from the Polish border. According to that army veteran, the March 3, 2022 attack resulted in a “bloodbath”, but he claimed that only Ukrainians — and no foreigners — died in the attack. The Canadian veteran said that many of the foreigners who were at the base fled Ukraine after the attack. He felt that this was for the best, because a number of these volunteers were “shit”: “gun nuts,” “right-wing bikers,” “ex-cops who are three hundred pounds.” A “chaotic” lack of discipline, he added, had been exacerbated by “a fair amount of cocaine.”

Mogelson explains:

Many foreigners, no matter how seasoned or élite, were unprepared for the reality of combat in Ukraine: the front line, which extends for roughly seven hundred miles, features relentless, industrial-scale violence of a type unknown in Europe since the Second World War. The ordeal of weathering modern artillery for extended durations is distinct from anything that Western soldiers faced in Iraq or Afghanistan (where they enjoyed a monopoly on such firepower).

According to Mogelson, “the Ukrainian military has been extraordinarily opaque about how it is executing the war, and journalistic embeds are almost nonexistent.” Mogelson nonetheless managed to obtain permission from the G.U.R., the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s intelligence directorate, to accompany American and other foreign soldiers for two weeks in the Donetsk region.

The foreign soldiers were attached to a unit led by Ukrainian soldiers from the 72nd Mechanized Brigade. That Brigade had previously served in Bakhmut, where “an enormous number of soldiers had died, and even more had been wounded. The trauma of Bakhmut,” wrote Mogelson, “had unnerved many of the survivors, and they now seemed wary of outsiders.” He continues:

Many of the professional soldiers in the 72nd had been killed or injured in Bakhmut. Conscripts had replenished the ranks. Some had attended a three-week basic infantry course in the U.K., with instructors from across Europe, but most had received only minimal training before being given Kalashnikovs and dispatched to the front.

“Turtle”, one of the foreign soldiers from the unit in which Mogelson was embedded, told Mogelson of a recent mission in Pavlika. Although Turtle and his team-members had briefed the 72nd on their route for the mission, a Ukrainian unit opened fire on the team as they approached. The team shot back. “We won, they didn’t,” Turtle told Mogelson.

The team then continued on its mission and stumbled upon a large grouping of Russian soldiers. A fierce firefight ensued, in which one U.S. soldier was killed and three others wounded. Numerous Russians were also killed. One of the wounded Americans was bleeding profusely and screaming for help, but Russian mortars prevented his rescue. He died.

The “debacle” had “further strained the team’s rapport with the 72nd.” Turtle confessed to Mogelson that “some people don’t like us in this area anymore”. Mogelson continues:

The leeriness was mutual. Members of the brigade’s reconnaissance company—with which the team was supposed to coordinate—had followed the foreigners partway through the tree line, and had agreed to provide additional backup if anything went wrong. Yet none of the Ukrainians had joined the battle with the Russians. (One of them later told me that their radio had malfunctioned and they had not heard the team’s call for help.)

Eventually, Mogelson accompanied the unit on a dangerous, front-line mission. During the mission, Mogelson and the soldiers were forced to take shelter in the ruins of a house as Russian artillery rained down on them. Remarkably, none of them was killed.

After narrowly escaping with their lives, the soldiers reflected upon their brush with death and their reasons for coming to Ukraine:

[Turtle] once told me that many volunteers who quit the Legion did so because they hadn’t been honest with themselves about their reasons for coming to Ukraine. “Because when you get here your reason will be tested,” Turtle said. “And if it’s something weak, something that’s not real, you’re going to find out.” He was dubious of foreigners who claimed to want to help Ukraine. Turtle wanted to help, too, of course, but that impulse was not enough; it might get you to the front, but it wouldn’t keep you there.

I asked what was keeping him there.

“In the end, it’s just that I love this shit,” he said. “And maybe I can’t escape that—maybe that’s the way it’s always gonna be.”

What kind of a human being ‘loves’ war?

A recent interview by British YouTuber Nikolas Lloyd sheds an even harsher light on the sordid reality of this war and the foreigners serving in it. Lloyd conducted a three-part interview of a British soldier who had just concluded seven months of service in Ukraine’s International Legion. (All three parts of the interview are embedded below.)

In the interview, the soldier identifies himself as “Joseph MacDonald”. MacDonald begins the interview by explaining that he travelled to Poland from the U.K. shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in late February of last year. From Warsaw, he was bused across the Ukraine-Poland border, along with other volunteers, to the International Center for Peacekeeping and Security. MacDonald arrived at the Center shortly before the Russian missile strike of March 3, 2022. He estimates that over 100 Ukrainian officer recruits were killed in that strike. Unlike Mogelson, who reports that no foreigners died in the attack, MacDonald asserts that “a few” recruits for the International Legion were in fact killed.[1]

MacDonald blames the foreigners’ deaths on poor security measures:

If you are going to hide a bunch of chaps who are foreign and who have come to fight for your country, don’t put them at the ‘International Cooperation Centre’, that’s all I’ve got to say. If you were playing pin-the-missile-on-the-donkey, and I was Vladimir Putin, it would be a good bet, right next to the Polish border, called the ‘International Cooperation Centre’, large base, definitely capable of dealing with all of these people coming in, let’s blow that one up, eh?[2]

MacDonald reveals that, in the aftermath of the strike, “there was an awful lot of looting going on. Like a lot of looting”.[3] He explains:

A lot of people who came to volunteer for the Ukrainians were also kleptomaniacs or just total [indiscernible] who’d gone there with the intention of plunder… That is a problem that the Legion kept having for several months…. It was a no-vetting, sign-up-we’ll-take-anyone free-for-all at the start, and it drew in a lot of undesirable types.

MacDonald then refers to the infamous Georgian Legion, some of whose members were at the International Cooperation Center at the time of the Russian missile strike. (Members of the Georgian Legion are suspected of having executed a dozen Russian soldiers after they had surrendered.) According to MacDonald, in the aftermath of Russia’s strike on the International Cooperation Center, he and a British fellow soldier came across Georgian Legion members who were looting an armoury. The looters reacted menacingly when the other British soldier tried meekly to stop their looting. MacDonald describes the Georgian Legion as “not the most uniform and regimented group of guys”, “quite ‘piratey’” and a “pack of hyenas on a carcass”.[4]

MacDonald confirms that, after the missile strike, a “great desertion” happened: 600-700 of the 1,000 or so foreign volunteers left the International Legion. Some left Ukraine altogether, but others went to other Ukrainian militias, believing or hoping that, in those militias, they would find opportunities to shoot Russians with impunity, which MacDonald describes as “sweet spots”. But the reality, according to MacDonald, is that “there is no sweet spot like that – if you are fighting the Russians, you are getting horribly shelled…. No one gets the Call of Duty experience. The artillery strike is on all the time.”

At one point, MacDonald comments on the Canadian soldiers with whom he served. He commends the “really great guys from First Nations and the French side”, but then adds “sadly, the rest of them proved a bit on the cowardly side. That’s the only way to say it.” According to MacDonald, these soldiers – even those who had served up to ten years in the Canadian military – could not endure shelling that was of medium intensity (let alone high-intensity shelling). He observes that a soldier who served in Afghanistan “didn’t like it when the enemy had bigger guns than him, so he went home.” MacDonald refers to these soldiers as “goldilocks soldiers”.[5]

While praising U.S. soldiers from U.S. special forces, MacDonald asserts that many of the U.S. soldiers he encountered were “spoiled”, adding “it’s very easy to be the best army in the world when you can get an F-16 to go and blow up a mortar team on a hillside… I haven’t seen a fighter plane this whole bloody war. They’re all over Kyiv, keeping the President safe.”[6] Artillery, mortars, tanks and rockets do “all the killing on the battleground… Your rifle, if that accounts for 1% of the dead in this war, I’d be surprised.”[7]

MacDonald comments extensively on the three Ukrainian commanders under whom he served. MacDonald found the first of them to be “excellent”, but that commander’s replacement was “very obtuse” and “inept”: he “seemed to think that picking a nice house for him and all his drivers to stay in was much more important than picking a house where you had radio comms to your actually deployed units in the field.”[8]

While posted in a trench in Ukraine, MacDonald contracted lime disease. “They weren’t feeding us very well at the time”, he states. “Pretty much everyone had Covid or some kind of common or garden flu.” After finding a large tick in his nose, MacDonald became very ill. He went to a hospital in the central Ukrainian city of Rivna. There, the doctor who treated him “was not to Western standards” and “looked like he smoked about 80 a day and had a bottle of vodka every night” while “using some very 1950s implements”. Ultimately, MacDonald found it necessary to return to the U.K. to receive proper medical treatment.[9]

At one point, MacDonald’s company was transferred from one city to another. His company’s convoy included two trucks containing advanced military rifles, machine guns and javelins — “a whole company’s worth of Western weapons”. According to MacDonald, the two trucks “just disappeared” as the convoy was in transit.[10]

After explaining that foreign volunteers were treated much more favourably by Ukrainian commanders than Ukrainian rank-and-file soldiers were treated, MacDonald describes a Russian strike on a Ukrainian military base. He explains that, whereas the soldiers of the International Legion were permitted to spread out their tents so as to reduce the risk of mass casualties in a missile attack, Ukrainian soldiers at a nearby military base were forced to keep their tents close to each other. The Russians dropped a thermobaric bomb on the tents at that base and killed about 135 Ukrainian soldiers. They apparently were all young officer recruits.

Several important themes emerge from these accounts, and they are themes that I have commented upon previously (see, for example, here and here).

First, this war is unlike any war that NATO has fought in at least fifty years. It is happening on a massive, industrial scale and is being waged by NATO and its proxy against a peer enemy, whereas NATO’s typical wars are fought against enemies that are vastly outmatched. As Stalin observed, artillery is the “God of war”, and Russians have plenty of it. By most accounts, their firepower is vastly superior to that of Ukraine and is inflicting horrific casualties on Ukraine’s military, many of whose conscripts have not been adequately trained.

Second, many of the foreigners who have gone to Ukraine are there for ignoble reasons. They certainly are not the sort of persons whom Western militaries should be arming.

Third, Ukraine is a deeply corrupt country. Inevitably, much of Western weaponry transferred to Ukraine will end up in the hands of criminals, as Interpol’s chief has warned. Flooding Ukrainian society with deadly weapons imperils the long-term stability of Europe and is a recipe for disaster.

Thus far, Western states have expended well in excess of US$125 billion on sustaining this war. Hundreds of thousands of persons have been killed or wounded. The Ukrainian economy lies in smoking ruins and would collapse without massive Western financial aid. Russia is in the process of destroying the Ukrainian energy grid as Ukrainians head into the heart of winter. Worst of all, with every act of escalation, the risk of a nuclear holocaust increases.

The humane and sensible thing to do is to seek a negotiated resolution of this war. The worst thing we can do is escalate it.

When, if ever, will Western governments come to their senses?

There are several academics whose work on Russia and the former Soviet Union I have found to be excellent and reliable. These include the late Stephen F. Cohen, Richard Sakwa, Paul Robinson, Dominic Lieven, and Nicolai Petro (among a few others). I had been looking forward to reading Petro’s latest work, The Tragedy of Ukraine, which couldn’t be more timely.

Petro dives into the complex history of Ukraine and its relationship to imperial Russia, the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia. He emphasizes the point that, unfortunately, has to be repeated constantly in the west that this conflict did not begin on February 24, 2022. As Petro writes:

“[T}he current conflict is merely the latest in a series of conflicts that have bedeviled this area of the world for more than a century. These include: the great power rivalry between Russia and the West; the conflict between Russia and Ukraine; and finally, the conflict within Ukraine itself over its national identity, its relationship to Russia, and its role in the world. It is, in sum, a conflict about who gets to define Ukrainian identity.” (p. 1)

He goes on to explain the internal divisions within the borders of post-Soviet Ukraine. In western Ukraine, the Galician influence predominates and this is predicated upon the rejection of not only Russian culture, but of virtually any active relationship with Russia, including trade. This attitude is considered by its adherents to be “decolonization” and representing the only way for Ukraine to be truly Ukrainian. It is an ideology based on exclusion and an ethnic definition of identity.

In the southeastern part of modern day Ukraine, there is what Petro calls the Maloross identity, which has close historical and cultural ties to Russia that are of major importance, though this population didn’t necessarily want to become part of the Russian state prior to the events of 2013-2014 and the subsequent civil war. According to Petro, the Maloross Ukrainian identity saw itself as distinct from but complementary to Russia and its culture. It rejected the view that Ukraine must choose between Europe and Russia, preferring instead a partnership with both. On one side, the Galician ideal was for Ukraine to serve as a bulwark of the west against Russia, while the Maloross ideal was for Ukraine to serve as a bridge between both.

This was the core of the problem after the illegal overthrow of the democratically elected government in Kiev in 2014, a government that subsequently implemented policies on behalf of a Galician ideal. The residents of the Donbas (Maloross) saw the change of government as an illegitimate coup and genuinely feared and rejected the Galician policies it began to undertake.

Petro acknowledges that Ukraine has had a rocky path as an independent country since 1991, experiencing economic decline and high inequality, despite having emerged from the Soviet era as one of the most developed and resource-rich republics of the USSR*. Moreover, there are region-dependent differences in terms of economics in the country (e.g. industrial v. agricultural, etc.) This has been another factor that has contributed to the complicated divisions and instability within Ukraine.

As the conflict of 2014 has escalated over the years, the history of Ukraine has become weaponized by both sides to varying degrees:

“At its heart this is a debate about power – the power to define Ukrainian identity. In this power struggle both sides appeal to history, which since 2014 has become a minefield that must be navigated very carefully. The issue of whether to interpret a millennia of common history with Russia – as a colonial imposition to be rejected, or an imperial heritage to be proud of – has often been used to keep the conflict between these two competing Ukrainian national identities burning.” (p. 38)

Ukraine, along with Russia, constituted a “loose federation of East Slavic tribes – warrior-traders – ruled by the Rurik dynasty from 9th to 13th century”. Ties were buttressed by a shared Orthodox religion due to Prince Vladimir choosing that religion for people of the Kieven Rus area in the 10th century. By the time of the Mongol invasion of the 13th century, the area had degenerated into rivalries among various princes who’d lorded over a dozen or so independent areas.

The Mongol massacre killed about 2/3 of the population. Some of the survivors managed to flee closer to what is modern-day Moscow and those who remained were forced into subjugation. Slavic bonds were ruptured by the Mongol takeover. Those from the southern part of the Kieven Rus region later became known as Ukrainians and were cut off and later ruled over by Poles and Lithuanians .

In the mid-17th century (1654), the Pereyaslavl Treaty united Ukraine to Russia as an autonomous region and in turn led to a 13-year war between Russia and Poland which resulted in the division of Ukraine between Poland and Russia (Britannica). From then on, the Ukrainian-speaking parts of Poland-Lithuania were progressively conquered by the Russian Empire, leading many Orthodox Ukrainians to strongly identify with Russia . From the late 18th century on, Russians referred to Ukraine territory as Malorussia or “Little Russia” viewing Ukraine and the Ukrainian language as having emanated from the greater Russian history and culture and later sought to standardize it to Russian.

The Western parts of modern-day Ukraine were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries while the southeastern portion was part of the Russian Empire. An independent Ukrainian state emerged very briefly in the years of the Russian Revolution and early civil war period, but the project failed in 1919. From then until WWII, parts of Ukraine were ruled by Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Soviet Russia – the latter becoming a Soviet Republic ruled by the Communist Party. Russian/Soviet rule of Ukraine in the 19th and 20th centuries created complex patterns of migration with significant parts of southern Ukraine settled by Russians, including those who came to work in the mines and factories of the Donbas region, bringing the Russian language with them.**

Petro points out that many contemporary Russians view the Russians (Great Russians in the north), Ukrainians (Little Russians in the south), and Belarusians (White Russians in the west) as one people as promulgated by the writings of Innocent who was the 17th century Abbott of the Kieven Orthodox Monastery. Innocent’s assertion was based on territorial unity, religious (Orthodox faith) and linguistic/literary unity throughout these areas, and the governing princes of all territories having descended from the Ryurik line.

An alternative historical view – the western Ukrainian/Galician view – was put forth by an academic named Mikhail Grushevsky (1866-1934) who taught at the University of Kiev and asserted that “Ukraina-Rus” emerged on the territory of modern-day Ukraine much earlier and had descended from the ancient steppe culture of Scythia leading to “divergent patterns of development in Ukraine and Russia’ which included “a distinct line of statehood for Kievan Rus that in the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia, and later in the Zaporozhian Sich, before it was finally incorporated into the Russian Empire by Catherine the Great.” (p. 39)

Ukrainian nationalists do not think Rus should equate with Russia but that Russia should be referred to as Muscovy and that Moscow did not emerge as the new center of a common people from Kiev due to the Mongol destruction of Kiev in the 13th century, but as a “poisonous” phenomena that kept Kiev from its proper glory.

This conflict, given its historical and ideological roots as well as its brutality, would appear to be implacable. But, here, Petro provides a possible means of avoiding a never-ending cycle of hatred and revenge once the sides cease actual physical fighting. Essentially, Petro thinks a truth and reconciliation commission should be put in place. He provides examples of successful but somewhat different models of such commissions in South Africa, Spain and Guatemala.

But another argument offered for this solution goes much further back – the role of the Greek tragedy, which – contrary to what many may believe – played a far more crucial role in Greek life than merely as a source of entertainment. He explains that Greek tragedy focused on the human emotions that play an important role in intractable conflicts that cause suffering and that the exploration and acting out of tragedy fostered understanding, compassion and healing among the different sides to a conflict, thus seeking to break the cycle of hatred and vengeance.

The tragedies acted out in Athens deliberately took on controversial topics, provided moral guidance, and taught its audience how to be better citizens, with the idea that qualities like moderation and prudence were skills that could be taught to everyone. Themes addressed included the negative consequences of hubris, arrogance, and inequality. The danger of self-righteousness, the problem of creating a larger moral wrong when attempting to correct a perceived existing moral wrong, was recognized. According to Petro: “tragedy trained citizens to recognize and avoid policies that could lead to disaster.” (p. 10)

Petro uses the Greek tragedy playwright Aeschylus as an example:

“Aeschylus wants the audience to see that creating a harmonious social order requires former enemies to become stakeholders in society.” (p. 30); He explains that the process involves: 1) raising awareness that the effort of reconciliation will require all of society to effectuate, 2) catharsis or purging, and 3) dialogue. This will lead to genuine justice rather than the continuing cycle of revenge.

Petro also states that Ukraine, in order to attain long-term stability, must eventually base its sense of identity and loyalty on civic patriotism rather than ethnicity, religion or culture:

“While nationalism values above all else cultural, religious, and ethnic unity, patriotism values above all else the people’s common liberty, which is enshrined in the republican ideal of equality before the law.” (p. 131)

If you’re looking for a thought-provoking book that explains the complex history of Ukraine, its relationship to Russia, and the underlying causes of the current conflict, I highly recommend this one.

*An excellent book that delves into this specific aspect of post-Soviet Ukraine can be found here and more about it will be discussed at this blog in the future.

**This historical summary is taken not just from information in Petro’s book, but also Richard Sakwa’s Frontline Ukraine and Anatol Lieven’s “Ukraine Should be a Bridge, Not a Battleground.“

By Patrick Lawrence, Sheerpost, 1/4/22

It is never very easy to understand what is going on in the world if you depend on The New York Times for an accounting of daily events. This is especially so in all matters to do with Russia, China, or any other nation The Times has on its blacklist because the policy cliques in Washington have these countries on their blacklist. Rely on The Times for its reporting in these cases and you are by definition in the dark. No exceptions. This is what the once-but-no-longer newspaper of record has done to itself and to its readers over, I would say, the past 20–odd years. It is now nothing more than an instrument of the imperial ideology emanating from our nation’s capital.

It follows that we must always take care to read The Times, odious as we may find it, in the same way millions of Soviet citizens over many decades made it a point to read Pravda. As noted severally in these commentaries, it is important to know what we are supposed to think happened on a given day before going in search of what happened.

Never were these assertions truer than they were as 2022 turned to 2023. On December 30, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping gathered by video for one of their regular summits. The Russian and Chinese presidents have now met, in person or electronically, 40–odd times by my count. A day later Putin delivered his customary New Year’s address to the Russian people. These were momentous events by any measure. They declared Moscow’s and Beijing’s historic commitment to constructing nothing less than a new world order. The world turned in 2022, to put the point another way. But you could not possibly know this if you read The Times’s accounts and nothing more.

Here I must single out the reporting of Anton Troianovski. While I do not approve of attacking a journalist in ad hominem fashion, it is meet and just, as the New Testament would put it, to single out Troianovski as the worst Moscow bureau chief The Times has had in place at least since Andrew Higgins, Troianovski’s immediate predecessor, who was in turn the worst bureau chief since Neil MacFarquhar, who preceded Higgins and was worse than his predecessor, and let us leave it there, as this list of worse-than-the-worst extends back many years.

In the method just outlined, I read first of the Putin–Xi summit, which was unusually long and pointed, in a piece Troianovski filed afterward from Moscow. I then read the detailed readouts issued by the Chinese and Russian governments, which are respectively here and here. Then I was astonished to discover the sheer irresponsibility of Troianovski and his employer. Even correspondents who serve more or less openly as propagandists can sink lower than what you thought was their low point, I had to remind myself…

Read full article here.

By Daniel Larison, Responsible Statecraft, 1/2/23

The nuclear disarmament of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine was one of the great success stories of the end of the Cold War, and it was one of the most significant victories for the cause of nonproliferation.

When the Soviet Union ceased to exist, these newly independent states had to manage the problem of the Soviet nuclear legacy left behind in their lands. Their disarmament was bound up with their status as independent, sovereign countries as they sought and needed to be integrated with the rest of the world.

The commitment of the non-Russian republics to disarm saved the original Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) and upheld the principles of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and their eventual disarmament is one of the underappreciated achievements of U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War era.

While all three states were always willing to get rid of the nuclear weapons they had inherited from the Soviet Union, the paths that they took to disarmament were somewhat different with respect to the terms and timing of removing these weapons and their delivery systems from their territories. The Ukrainian case is the most involved of the three, and because of the war in Ukraine it is also the most salient today in current debates about disarmament and nonproliferation. It is therefore fortunate that there is a new book that can expertly guide us through this complicated and important history.

Mariana Budjeryn’s Inheriting the Bomb: The Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine is an excellent study of how the process of disarmament unfolded. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including some Ukrainian sources not tapped before, Budjeryn details in great depth the internal deliberations of the Ukrainian government and the intensive rounds of negotiations among the U.S., Russia and the three non-Russian republics.

The book should become a standard reference for anyone working on this issue and on nonproliferation more broadly, and I expect that it will.

Budjeryn shows how the Ukrainian government realized that they had no practical alternative to disarmament if they were going to be a full-fledged member of the international community, but they also believed that their country should not give up the weapons without receiving something in return. The Ukrainian government took a nuanced position on the question of disarmament, as they were committed to denuclearization but wanted, for reasons of sovereignty and leverage, to emphasize that they “owned” the weapons on their territory even if they couldn’t and wouldn’t use them.

This insistence on ownership created some tensions in relations with both the U.S. and Russia, and opened Ukraine up to untrue charges of “backsliding” on its commitments. But in the end, Ukraine was never in a position to keep the weapons and did not want to keep them.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the story is how the three non-Russian republics leveraged the U.S. desire to ratify and implement START into securing themselves places at the negotiating table. Russia would have preferred to keep all arms control discussions bilateral, but since START could not be implemented without the cooperation of the other states it became necessary to include them.

This created some interesting contradictions in Washington’s dealings with these states. On the one hand, Washington accepted that the three non-Russian republics were successors to the Soviet Union for the purposes of arms control under START, but it would not accept that they were successors to the Soviet Union’s status as a nuclear weapons state.

The U.S. bottom line was that there should be no additional nuclear weapons states emerging from the collapsed Soviet Union. The NPT was clear that there could only be five nuclear weapons states, and the U.S. was not going to compromise on this point. This meant that Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine had to commit to joining the NPT as non-nuclear weapons states while simultaneously assisting the U.S. in eliminating part of the Soviet nuclear arsenal that they had in their countries.

It took some time to get all three across the finish line with the ratification of both treaties, but it is a credit to their governments and to the Bush and Clinton administrations that they kept this process moving forward to a successful conclusion.

If Ukraine’s disarmament is discussed today, it is often mentioned as a supposed cautionary tale of what other states shouldn’t do. Shortly after the 2022 Russian invasion began, John Ullyot and Thomas Grant declared Ukraine’s disarmament to have been a mistake: “If you abandon your nuclear program and entrust your security to formal guarantees and conventional deterrence, you gamble with your future. If you give up your nukes, you give up your national security ace-in-the-hole.”

Bill McGurn of The Wall Street Journal asked rhetorically, “If Ukraine hadn’t given up its nukes after the collapse of the Soviet Union, would Vladimir Putin have dared invade?” This line of thinking is misguided for several reasons.

As Budjeryn shows, there really was no serious option of keeping the inherited nuclear weapons without exposing Ukraine to international opprobrium and isolation, and the cost of building up an indigenous nuclear weapons program to maintain their own arsenal was prohibitive. She sums up the Ukrainian foreign ministry’s view at the time: “The negative repercussions of the nuclear option would far outweigh the positive.”

It is a mistake for people today to indulge the fantasy that Ukraine could have kept these weapons without suffering severe negative political and economic consequences, and it gives encouragement to would-be proliferators that our collective commitment to nonproliferation is waning.

Another problem with the counterfactual is that there is no guarantee that Ukraine would have been made more secure if it had paid the high price to retain these weapons. If anything, possession of what would have been the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal probably would have made Ukraine more of a target for interference and intervention, and the resources it would have had to pour into its nuclear weapons program would have come at the expense of its other defenses.

Budjeryn quotes Boris Tarasyuk, Ukraine’s then-foreign minister, as saying, “For Ukraine to keep nuclear weapons would have been to go against the entire world order.” When critics of disarmament argue that Ukraine should have somehow kept this arsenal, they are ignoring the enormous, immediate costs that Ukraine would have faced for doing so. Ukraine would not only have been putting its good relations with the U.S. and its allies at risk by keeping these weapons, but counterintuitively it would have also risked its own survival.

Budjeryn concludes: “If Ukraine had refused to join the NPT and kept a part of its nuclear inheritance, it would not be the same country it is today but with nuclear weapons. Indeed, it is doubtful whether it would be a country at all.”“Inheriting the Bomb” is essential reading for anyone interested in issues of disarmament and nonproliferation. It is exceptionally well-researched and well-written, and it deepens the reader’s understanding of the complex problems that were created by the collapse of the Soviet Union. It also reminds us of the importance of careful, patient diplomacy in managing multiple potential crises peacefully.

Link here.