Mir Abdullah
There was a time when Kyiv was more powerful than Moscow. Ukraine got independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. It was the time when Ukraine held the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world, including an estimated 1,900 strategic warheads, 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and 44 strategic bombers. By 1996, Ukraine had returned all of its nuclear warheads to Russia in exchange for economic aid and security assurances. To solidify security commitments to Ukraine, the United States, Russia, and the United Kingdom signed the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances on December 5, 1994. The countries promised to respect the sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine. It seems clear that the security guarantees detailed in the Budapest Memorandum are being ignored by the signatories. Ukraine also signed the Lisbon Protocol and it joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear-weapon state in 1994. If Ukraine had not given its nuclear weapons to Russia, the situation would have been quite different. Since Russia launched a full-scale military invasion into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, fighting has caused more than four thousand civilian deaths and internally displaced more than seven million people so far, according to the United Nations. Moreover, the main reason which became the cause for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was that Ukraine had shown its desire to join North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to protect itself from Russia. Russia never wants Ukraine to be part of NATO because of two reasons; firstly, the presence of NATO armed forces in Ukraine is a serious threat to Russia and Russia is not ready to accept it at any cost. Secondly, Ukraine is the second-largest country in Europe, it has access to the Black Sea and its borders are connected to Russia to the east. Therefore, Russia does not want Ukraine under the influence of the west. To sum up, if Ukraine stopped showing its tilt towards NATO and fulfilled other demands of Russia, this volatile situation would be assuaged.
