Uncommon Knowledge: Ukraine Deal Turns an Arsonist Into a...

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By Newsweek EditorsShareNewsweek is a Trust Project member

On December 5, 1994, Ukraine traded the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal for paper promises. The Budapest Memorandum pledged that Russia, the U.S. and the U.K. would “respect” Ukraine’s borders and consult together if trouble arose; 20 years later, Moscow seized Crimea. In December 2009—five years before the annexation—Washington and Moscow jointly confirmed "that the assurances recorded in the Budapest Memoranda will remain in effect.” Now comes a U.S.-backed draft “peace” plan that would go further still: it would create “a joint American-Russian working group on security issues…to promote and ensure compliance with all provisions of this agreement.” In effect, the arsonist gets a badge and a clipboard.

Common Knowledge

Critics of the proposed deal see appeasement, not security guarantees. Writing in Washington Monthly, Tamar Jacoby calls the original 28-point blueprint “a recipe for appeasing Moscow,” noting it “handed Moscow nearly everything it wanted.”

The right-leaning case for the plan is blunter: end the war, redefine victory. “What has been lost in the noise…is the recognition that the bargain at hand accomplishes the primary objective: It ends the war. Moreover, it preserves a sovereign Ukrainian state and establishes a U.S.-backed security guarantee,” argues Reid Smith in The American Conservative.

Establishment Republicans have split. Former GOP leader Mitch McConnell said: “Those who think pressuring the victim and appeasing the aggressor will bring peace are kidding themselves,” asking “which difficult concessions are we pressing Russia to make?”

European voices bristle at both the substance and symbolism. The Guardian’s editorial board argued Vladimir Putin is “taking Trump for another ride on the Kremlin carousel,” while European governments circulated a counter-proposal that rejects pre-ordained territorial concessions and insists that any talks begin from the current line of contact.

Ukraine has often pointed back to Budapest. On February 19, 2022—days before the full-scale invasion—Volodymyr Zelensky told the Munich Security Conference that Kyiv had “tried three times to convene consultations with the guarantor states of the Budapest Memorandum…without success,” and was trying “for the fourth time.” The “guarantees,” he implied, had become an illusion.

Essential reading: Ukraine Is Running Out of Time—And Men

Uncommon Knowledge

The 1994 Budapest Memorandum gave Ukraine “security assurances,” not a defense treaty: commitments to respect borders, refrain from force, consult in case of trouble, and seek U.N. Security Council action if nuclear threats arose. No enforcement body was created, and the language was deliberately less than a binding collective-defense guarantee. The instrument is widely described by U.S. officials and analysts as a political commitment—not a legally binding pact.

By contrast, the current U.S. draft would engineer an enforcement apparatus with Russia in it. The clause in question reads: “A joint American-Russian working group on security issues will be established to promote and ensure compliance with all provisions of this agreement.” Whatever its final fate, that line would, on paper, formalize Moscow as co-arbiter of Ukraine’s postwar security—a sharp departure from Budapest’s consultative, UN-channeled model.

The timeline matters. On December 4, 2009, as the first START treaty expired, the U.S. and Russia issued a joint statement: “the assurances recorded in the Budapest Memoranda will remain in effect after December 4, 2009.” Five years later, Russian forces took Crimea, and on March 27, 2014 the U.N. General Assembly (Resolution 68/262) affirmed Ukraine’s territorial integrity and declared the Crimean referendum invalid.

Ukraine trading in its own security also matters. Kyiv removed the last nuclear warhead from its territory on June 1, 1996, after the Trilateral Statement process, an achievement the Clinton White House praised as eliminating “more than 4,000 strategic and tactical nuclear warheads” from Ukraine’s soil. Ukraine never had operational control of those warheads, but the dismantlement of their delivery systems took years more—heavy bombers were eliminated by 2001 and silos by 2001–2002—under U.S.-funded cooperative threat reduction.

The most recent draft plan also proposes to redraw the problem Ukraine gave up nukes to avoid—coerced revisions of borders—by locking in “de facto” Russian control of territories, even where Ukraine still holds ground, and by capping Ukraine’s army. Reporting indicates the U.S. version floated a 600,000-troop ceiling and treated parts of Donetsk and Luhansk as Russian; a European counter-proposal raises the cap to 800,000 and starts any territorial talks from the current line of contact.

Budapest’s Clause 6 said the signatories will “consult in the event a situation arises that raises a question concerning these commitments.” When Russia violated those commitments in 2014 and 2022, Kyiv repeatedly sought those consultations—including the high-profile appeal Zelensky aired in Munich. The meetings never functioned as a shield because the memorandum lacked an enforcer. The draft now circulating would answer that omission by naming an enforcer—including Russia itself. Whatever one thinks of the trade, the comparison is stark: the 1994 deal left the arsonist outside the firehouse; the 2025 draft would put him on the fire brigade.

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