Did Ukraine make a mistake when it gave up its nuclear arsenal? That question was first asked after Russia occupied and annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in March 2014. When the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991, Ukraine had on its territory 1,900 strategic nuclear warheads, 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles and 45 strategic bombers, constituting the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. Three years later, Kyiv agreed to give it up in exchange for guarantees for its sovereignty and territorial integrity by Russia, the U.S. and the UK. Was it the right call? It was, said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, in an Aviation Week Viewpoint written shortly after Russia’s seizure of Crimea. Pifer argued that the newly independent nation lacked the infrastructure and money to maintain a nuclear arsenal on its own. Ukraine also would have been an outcast, deprived of billions of dollars in economic aid from the EU and U.S. and access to lending from the International Monetary Fund. “Broke and friendless, a Ukraine facing a crisis with Russia would have done so alone,” Pifer wrote. Today, as Russian forces carve up the country and President Vladimir Putin declares it had never been a real nation, the question of whether Ukraine should have given up its nuclear weapons is back in the forefront.
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