Follow us on social

Zelensky Macron Trump

The Budapest Memo holds keys to ending the Ukraine war

Decades of broken promises have raised hard questions about whether new security guarantees can be upheld

Analysis | Europe

As the incoming Trump administration prepares to launch negotiations aimed at ending the current phase of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine, the question of security guarantees is certain to feature prominently in talks.

Talk of security guarantees is nothing new — indeed, it has underscored much of the drama that has unfolded since Russia’s initial military buildup in 2021. Moscow insisted that the United States and NATO undertake legally binding obligations in its two “draft treaties,” published on the eve of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, aimed at guaranteeing Ukraine’s neutrality and rolling back NATO forces in Central and Eastern Europe to where they were prior to the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act. Kyiv, for its part, naturally wants ironclad measures that can ensure it will not fall victim to another war of aggression in the years ahead.

To some extent, however, this is all déjà vu. Thirty years ago last month, the Budapest Memorandum was signed.

Aimed at providing security assurances to Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan in exchange for their entry into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Budapest Memorandum committed Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom to abstain from military and economic coercion against these three newly independent post-Soviet states. Its lessons offer important clues for how to bring peace to what has tragically become a war-torn region.

The memorandum has become the source of considerable mythmaking following Russia’s brazen violation of Ukrainian sovereignty on February 24, 2022 (though some have asserted that the United States was the first to violate the memorandum with its sanctions against Belarus). Most notably, Atlanticists and pro-Ukrainian advocates often insist that Kyiv gave up its nuclear weapons — the ultimate deterrent and guarantee of one’s own security — in exchange for promises that its borders would be respected.

Of course, these missiles were Soviet — they were never functionally Ukrainian and were beyond Kyiv’s ability to maintain. Lost even more often in this discussion is the fact that the newly minted Ukrainian state prohibited itself from accepting, producing or acquiring nuclear weapons in its 1990 Declaration of State Sovereignty, the same declaration in which Kyiv announced its “intention of becoming a permanently neutral state.”

Famously, the memorandum offered Ukraine security assurances rather than legally binding security guarantees, a distinction explicitly stressed by American diplomats during the talks. Indeed, the memorandum was never approved by the U.S. Senate, as treaties must be, because it did not proffer any security guarantees to Ukraine. Nor did it commit the U.S. — or any other signatory — to any specific punitive action in the event of aggression against Ukraine, affirming instead a “commitment to seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance” to Kyiv in case of an armed attack.

Given the history of the drafting process, Washington cannot be accused of pulling a fast one on Ukraine with ambiguous language or by using terms that may have been lost in translation. Simply put, the United States has never promised to fight for Ukraine — a position held in 1994 and reaffirmed by the Biden administration since Russia’s full-scale invasion. Any security guarantees offered to Ukraine aimed at bringing current hostilities to a close will be novel ones, not compensation for the West having supposedly failed to uphold its existing obligations.

In this context, Western states will need to weigh carefully just how far they are prepared to go, since Russia has demonstrated its willingness to fight for Ukraine while the West — initial suggestions of European peacekeepers aside — has not. French President Emmanuel Macron’s discussion earlier this year of sending European troops to Ukraine to prevent a Russian victory was promptly shut down by Western allies. One could argue that Ukraine’s status as a security “gray area” is what prompted Russia’s invasion, but permanent neutrality is just as plausible a resolution to this dilemma as NATO membership.

But perhaps the greatest lesson to derive from the history of the Budapest Memorandum is that context matters. The memorandum was agreed at a time when relations between Russia and the West were much more favorable (although by the end of 1994, Boris Yeltsin was already warning of the risk of a “cold peace”). The conclusion is that diplomacy — an evolving mixture of deterrence and reassurance — is consistently needed to tend to international relationships to ensure that agreements are upheld. The same will be true when it comes to “guaranteeing” that Russia will never invade Ukraine again.

By contrast, the Western approach to relations with Russia in the post-Cold War era has often been more legalistic than diplomatic — “throwing the book” at Moscow by pointing out the alleged ways in which it has failed to live up to its international commitments. Yet Kyiv was all too happy not to implement the Minsk agreements, which brought the initial rounds of fighting in the Donbas conflict to a halt, using the intervening years between 2015 and 2022 to strengthen its hand. Similarly, Moscow believed that the post-Cold War status quo was imposed upon it at a time of national weakness — something it sought to rectify by way of its “draft treaties.”

It is easy to say pacta sunt servanda, that agreements must be kept. But this requires building and maintaining trust. Doing so will require all sides to stop airing their tired narratives in public — such as when Moscow dismisses the perspectives of Central and Eastern European states as Russophobic or when Western countries pointlessly insist that NATO expansion is directed against no one — and recognize one another’s security concerns as legitimate.


Top image credit: Frederic Legrand - COMEO / Shutterstock.com
Analysis | Europe
Rand Paul Donald Trump
Top photo credit: Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) (Shutterstock/Mark Reinstein) and President Trump (White House/Molly Riley)

Rand Paul to Trump: Don't 'abandon' MAGA over Maduro regime change

Washington Politics

Sen. Rand Paul said on Friday that “all hell could break loose” within Donald Trump’s MAGA coalition if the president involves the U.S. further in Ukraine, and added that his supporters who voted for him after 20 years of regime change wars would "feel abandoned" if he went to war and tried to topple Nicolas Maduro, too.

President Trump has been getting criticism from some of his supporters for vowing to release the files of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and then reneging on that promise. Paul said that the Epstein heat Trump is getting from MAGA will be nothing compared to if he refuses to live up to his “America First” foreign policy promises.

keep readingShow less
Trump ASEAN
Top photo credit: U.S. President Donald Trump looks at Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., next to Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim when posing for a family photo with leaders at the ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, October 26, 2025. Vincent Thian/Pool via REUTERS

‘America First’ meets ‘ASEAN Way’ in Kuala Lumpur

Asia-Pacific

The 2025 ASEAN and East Asia Summits in Kuala Lumpur beginning today are set to be consequential multilateral gatherings — defining not only ASEAN’s internal cohesion but also the shape of U.S.–China relations in the Indo-Pacific.

President Donald Trump’s participation will be the first by a U.S. president in an ASEAN-led summit since 2022. President Biden skipped the last two such summits in 2023 and 2024, sending then-Vice President Harris instead.

keep readingShow less
iran, china, russia
Top photo credit: Top image credit: Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov and and Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi shake hands as Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu looks on during their meet with reporters after their meeting at Diaoyutai State Guest House on March 14, 2025 in Beijing, China. Lintao Zhang/Pool via REUTERS

'Annulled'! Russia won't abide snapback sanctions on Iran

Middle East

“A raider attack on the U.N. Security Council.” This was the explosive accusation leveled by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov this week. His target was the U.N. Secretariat and Western powers, whom he blamed for what Russia sees as an illegitimate attempt to restore the nuclear-related international sanctions on Iran.

Beyond the fiery rhetoric, Ryabkov’s statement contained a message: Russia, he said, now considers all pre-2015 U.N. sanctions on Iran, snapped back by the European signatories of the 2015 nuclear deal (JCPOA) — the United Kingdom, France, Germany — “annulled.” Moscow will deepen its military-technical cooperation with Tehran accordingly, according to Ryabkov.

This is more than a diplomatic spat; it is the formal announcement of a split in international legal reality. The world’s major powers are now operating under two irreconcilable interpretations of international law. On one side, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany assert that the sanctions snapback mechanism of the JCPOA was legitimately triggered for Iran’s alleged violations. On the other, Iran, Russia, and China reject this as an illegitimate procedural act.

This schism was not inevitable, and its origin reveals a profound incongruence. The Western powers that most frequently appeal to the sanctity of the "rules-based international order" and international law have, in this instance, taken an action whose effects fundamentally undermine it. By pushing through a legal maneuver that a significant part of the Security Council considers illegitimate, they have ushered the world into a new and more dangerous state. The predictable, if imperfect, framework of universally recognized Security Council decisions is being replaced by a system where legal facts are determined by political interests espoused by competing power blocs.

This rupture followed a deliberate Western choice to reject compromises in a stand-off with Iran. While Iran was in a technical violation of the provisions of the JCPOA — by, notably, amassing a stockpile of highly enriched uranium (up to 60% as opposed to the 3.67% for a civilian use permissible under the JCPOA), there was a chance to avert the crisis. In the critical weeks leading to the snapback, Iran had signaled concessions in talks with the International Atomic Energy Agency in Cairo, in terms of renewing cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog’s inspectors.

keep readingShow less

LATEST

QIOSK

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.