Former Polish foreign minister and current European Parliament member Radoslaw Sikorski has suggested that the West should provide Ukraine with nuclear weapons in order to “defend its independence.”
Sikorski’s reasoning was grounded in a fundamentally flawed understanding of the 1994 Budapest memorandum (which sealed Ukraine’s accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons) – Ukraine did not lose security when it gave up its Soviet-era stockpile of nuclear weapons. Had Kiev opted to retain these weapons, it would have been treated by the international community as a pariah state whose viability would have been fatally undercut through missing out on the economic opportunity afforded by its agreeing to be rid of its inherited nuclear arsenal.
Ukraine’s security was enhanced by surrendering these nuclear weapons, since in doing so the door was opened for better relations with the West. Of course, Ukraine’s unfortunate history shows that this opportunity was squandered, given that Russia’s ongoing military operation which triggered Sikorski’s words was prompted not by some perceived Ukrainian weakness derived from its nuclear-free status, but rather the irresponsible policies of successive governments since the 2014 Maidan coup – that toppled former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych – which pursued the violent oppression of ethnic Russians in Donbass for eight years.
Incidentally, Sikorski himself was one of the prime movers in destabilising Ukraine. Along with the equally US friendly former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt, he helped formulate the EU’s Eastern partnership programme. This disastrous plan forced Kiev to choose between Brussels and Moscow. A situation which was clearly going to ignite the country’s delicate ethnic divides.
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