It was an inauspicious location for the signing of one of the most fateful agreements in the history of modern Ukraine.
On 5 December 1994, Ukraine’s second independent president, Leonid Kuchma, met Russian president Boris Yeltsin, US president Bill Clinton and British prime minister John Major at a business center in Budapest. They signed a memorandum on security assurances, which seemingly guaranteed the “independence and the sovereignty of the existing borders” of Ukraine. It promised that none of the signatories’ weapons “will ever be used against Ukraine, except in self-defence”.
At the time, Ukraine had the third-largest number of nuclear weapons in the world. The Budapest memorandum committed Kyiv to nuclear disarmament in exchange for financial compensation and that non-aggression pledge. By 1996, the last of Ukraine’s nuclear warheads had been sent to Russia for dismantling.
