Speaking at a discussion organized by the Mieroszewski Centre around a book by nuclear policy scholar Mariana Budjeryn, participants argued that public debate often oversimplifies Ukraine’s decision to denuclearize in the early 1990s.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine inherited one of the world’s largest nuclear arsenals, including intercontinental ballistic missiles and strategic bombers.
Ukraine had been the Soviet Union's engineering and manufacturing center for such weapons.
Speakers said Kyiv did not have full control over that force. Key command systems remained in Moscow, while maintaining such an arsenal would have required industrial, technological and financial resources that the newly independent state did not possess.
“Ukraine was literally packed with nuclear weapons, but from the state’s perspective those weapons were almost as if they did not exist, because all key decisions were made in Moscow,” Budjeryn said during the Warsaw meeting.
She added that the new state was also grappling with a deep economic crisis, building new institutions, and strong international pressure.
“Ukraine did not have the luxury of time to calmly work out its own strategy,” she said.
Participants said this helps explain why the popular claim that Ukraine simply “gave away” its weapons for nothing misses the realities of the time.
They argued that calling Ukraine the world’s third-largest nuclear power can also be misleading, because possessing warheads did not mean having a fully independent and operational nuclear deterrent.
A major part of the discussion focused on the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, under which the United States, Russia and the United Kingdom pledged to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in exchange for its denuclearization.
Speakers said the document was political in nature and did not include firm military guarantees. They added that its weakness lay not only in its wording, but in the fact that it was never backed up over time by deeper military and institutional cooperation.
That weakness became clear after Russia’s aggression against Ukraine began in 2014, when the memorandum’s promises were put to a real test.
Ukraine tried to invoke its provisions, but there were no effective mechanisms to enforce them.
Łukasz Kulesa said today’s public debate often falls into a simplistic equation, treating nuclear weapons as an automatic guarantee of safety.
“Today, simplified thinking is back, nuclear weapons equal security. That is simply not true, reality is much more complex,” he said.
The broader lesson, participants said, is that a country’s security does not rest on one element alone. It depends on a wider system of alliances, institutions, and credible international commitments.
In their view, that missing security structure, rather than denuclearization by itself, is central to understanding Ukraine’s situation today.