By Brian McDonald, Substack, 5/6/26

Brian McDonald is an Irish journalist based in Russia for many years.

Everyone thinks they understand the Budapest Memorandum. Almost no one actually does.

In the manner of things that get loudly misremembered in the trenches of modern discourse, the documents have acquired the aura of a sacred covenant. They are now promoted as a solemn, signed promise by the United States and the United Kingdom to leap to Ukraine’s defence, guns blazing, should its borders ever be crossed. However, that was never the intention and if we are to speak of memory, we might as well begin with the facts.

Back in 1991, when the Soviet Union folded like a tired accordion, three newly independent states awoke to find themselves the accidental custodians of Moscow’s nuclear warheads: Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. This greatly worried officials in London and Washington, who feared the nuclear materials might leak onto the black market. Thus, a scheme called the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program, often called the Nunn-Lugar program, was launched to ensure they were handed over to Russia.

Nevertheless, it’s important to remember these were warheads without a trigger, because the launch codes remained in Moscow. The rockets could no more be fired from Kiev or Minsk than from Kansas or Manchester.

To give it’s full title, The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances in connection with the Republic of Belarus’/Republic of Kazakhstan’s/Ukraine’s accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, actually three documents signed individually in December 1994, was never conceived as a mutual defence pact or some sort of NATO-lite.



Rather, it was an exchange: these three post-Soviet states would join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as non-nuclear nations. In return, the US, UK, and Russia would respect their independence and existing borders, and promise not to attack them either directly or by hybrid means, such as economic coercion.

In addition the three countries received substantial economic aid from both Moscow and Washington for agreeing to the terms. In 1994 alone, the US sent Ukraine over $600 million in cash payments, while Russia provided fuel rods for nuclear plants and forgave all outstanding oil and gas debts.

The key word in the memorandum was respect and the signatories offered political assurances rather than legally binding security guarantees. There were no enforcement clauses, no compensation protocols, no automatic sanctions mechanism and certainly no obligation for military intervention.

This point matters because nearly every time a public figure invokes the Budapest Memorandum, be it a billionaire with a Twitter account or a former diplomat with a selective memory, they fail to mention these key facts.



By 2006, the United States and Britain had already sanctioned Belarus in response to its elections; a move that, strictly speaking, ran contrary to Article 3 of the memorandum, which called for non-interference in economic affairs. Washington later admitted in 2013 that the document wasn’t legally binding, after another round of penalties were imposed on Minsk.

What’s more there’s another important detail which gets swept under the carpet. Back in the early 1990s, when the Soviet state was being smashed into 15 pieces, Moscow did something no accountant would recommend when it gathered up every ruble of the USSR’s foreign debt and agreed to carry it.



The consequences were brutal and the load nearly crippled the new federation. By the summer of ’98, with oil in the doldrums and the bond traders circling, Russia defaulted. While Kiev, Minsk and Almaty started life debt-free, Moscow, having traded the launch codes for a mountain of invoices, soon found itself receiving lectures about economic virtue from the same capitals that had watched it sink.

The reality is nobody can claim singular virtue here because the Budapest deal was handled casually by every signatory long before tanks or guns ever entered the conversation. Each party simply saw in it what suited them, and discarded the rest.

This definitely isn’t to diminish Ukraine or hold Russia as beyond reproach and we’re certainly not here to litigate the rights and wrongs since 2014. But it’s important to realize that the Memorandum was just an arrangement struck in the afterglow of the Soviet collapse and an understanding among powers eager to close one chapter, as swiftly as possible, and get on with writing the next.

Over time, it has acquired a meaning far larger than the text itself ever contained. Meanwhile, misunderstanding and misrepresentation have done the rest.

In the end, it’s probably fitting that the Budapest Memorandum is so widely misunderstood, given it was basically a strange Cold War coda born of ambiguity and upheld only so long as it was convenient. That, in itself, gives it a special kind of legacy.