Opinion - Yes, America has an obligation to help defend Ukraine
When the former Soviet republics declared independence in the early 1990s, Ukraine became the owner of the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. At the time, American leaders seemed to think that, as far as our own security was concerned, Russia would be a safer repository than Ukraine for nuclear arms.
We were, to be sure, a bit enamored — first with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and then with Russian President Boris Yeltsin. In retrospect, it is unclear which was more mystifying: thinking that Russia would be a better friend to America than Ukraine, or thinking that Ukraine could be a bigger threat than Russia to America.
Be that as it may, the U.S. applied tremendous pressure on Ukraine to surrender its nuclear arms to Russia and to sign a pledge to become a non-nuclear state. At the time, Ukraine possessed long-range bombers that could deliver nuclear bombs, intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads and a range of tactical nuclear arms. Ukraine at first resisted American pressure because, as its leaders said, it feared yet another repeat of Russian imperialism.
But after numerous negotiations and much American arm-twisting, the Ukrainians agreed to our demands. That agreement was memorialized in what is referred to as the Budapest Memorandum, signed by Ukraine, the U.S., the United Kingdom and the Russian Federation in 1994.
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