In 1994 Ukraine signed the Budapest Memorandum and gave up the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal in exchange for paper assurances. Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and launched a full-scale invasion in 2022, and neither Washington nor London used force to restore Ukraine’s 1991 borders. The memorandum contained no enforcement mechanism, only a promise to consult and, if needed, a referral to a UN Security Council where Russia holds a veto.
The Budapest Memorandum’s Broken Promise
In 1994 Ukraine shipped roughly 1,900 Soviet-era nuclear warheads to Russia for dismantlement. Tu-160 and Tu-95 bombers went too, along with hundreds of cruise missiles. The US, UK, and Russia pledged to respect Ukraine’s borders and to refrain from economic or military coercion.
Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014, then launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022. That war has killed tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians and displaced millions. Ukraine disarmed in exchange for assurances that the signatories did not enforce.
Ukraine disarmed in exchange for paper assurances. The signatories did not stop Moscow’s war.
Zelensky’s Munich Warning
On February 19, 2022, three days before Russia’s full invasion, Volodymyr Zelensky told the Munich Security Conference that Ukraine might walk away from the 1994 Budapest Memorandum’s non-nuclear pledge. He asked the assembled ministers and generals how many of them would accept their own country giving up nuclear weapons, then answered that Ukraine had received “no” to NATO membership, only “keep waiting.”
If the alliance would not close its open door, he said, Kyiv had the right to believe the memorandum was not working and that “all the package decisions of 1994 are in doubt.” The warning framed nuclear rearmament as the only remaining guarantee against a country that had already seized Crimea and Donbas.
Fedorov’s Call for a Ukrainian Deterrent
In October 2024, Melitopol’s exiled mayor Ivan Fedorov called for Ukraine to build nuclear weapons. He framed them as the only credible guarantee against further Russian occupation. Speaking from displacement, Fedorov argued that conventional deterrence had failed since 2014, when Russia seized Crimea, then parts of Donbas, and finally launched the full invasion of 2022.
He pointed to the Budapest Memorandum’s empty assurances and cited frontline cities like his own, occupied since March 2022, as proof that treaties without atomic backing do not stop Moscow. Fedorov proposed that Ukraine could produce a small deterrent within years, not decades, using its existing reactor fleet and the missile engineering base at Pivdenmash. His proposal was a direct challenge to Western arms restrictions.
The Kursk Incursion and Escalation Limits
In August 2024, Ukraine sent several thousand troops across the border into Russia’s Kursk region, with Leopard 2 tanks and Stryker armored vehicles rolling alongside them. By mid-month, Ukrainian units held roughly 1,000 square kilometers of Russian territory, including the town of Sudzha, and took hundreds of prisoners.
Moscow’s response involved airstrikes, redeployment of reserves, and a counterterrorism legal framework. No nuclear signal came beyond existing doctrine. Russia had already treated repeated drone strikes on airbases at Engels and Dyagilevo, as well as on the Kremlin itself, as below the nuclear threshold. The Kursk operation breached the state border and occupied sovereign Russian soil, yet the response stayed conventional. That outcome weakens the claim that Ukrainian nuclear weapons would make Russian escalation automatic or uncontrollable.
Zaporizhzhia and the Limits of Oversight
Since March 2022, Russian forces have occupied the six-reactor Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Enerhodar. They have used turbine halls as ammunition stores and fired Grad rockets from positions near the spent fuel storage facility. On August 5, 2022, shelling struck the plant’s nitrogen-oxygen station and high-voltage power line, forcing an emergency shutdown of one unit.
IAEA inspectors remained barred from the site for months. Stationing troops inside a reactor complex converts civilian energy infrastructure into a shielded artillery base, and no monitoring regime prevented it. The plant’s seizure demonstrates that international oversight operates only with Russian consent. A sovereign Ukrainian warhead stockpile would not depend on UN resolutions or inspection schedules to change Moscow’s calculus about shelling reactors. Deterrence, by contrast, requires no permission from the occupier.
