Serhii Plokhy and M. E. Sarotte
84 foreign affairs
cember 1991, enabling Ukrainians both to vote on that parliamentary
declaration and to choose a new president. More than 90 percent of
those who went to the polls endorsed independence, including 54 per-
cent of voters in Crimea, a largely Russian-populated peninsula con-
taining the major Black Sea port of Sevastopol. In the Donbas region
of eastern Ukraine, support for independence exceeded 80 percent.
Yeltsin, who by then had edged out Gorbachev as the preeminent
leader in Moscow, belatedly realized how much he had misjudged
Ukrainian desires to break free from the collapsing Soviet empire.
After the failed coup, he had been trying to keep Ukraine in the union
by threatening Kyiv with the annexation of Crimea and the Donbas.
The December vote proved, however, that Yeltsin’s threats had back-
fired; they had instead stiffened resistance in Kyiv and alarmed the
rest of the Soviet republics (and Washington, as well).
Yeltsin saw himself forced to change tack dramatically. He decided
to meet the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus a week after the Ukrainian
vote for independence at a Belarusian hunting lodge near the Polish
border. Recognizing that he could not keep Ukraine in the union, and
realizing that many other republics would follow Ukraine’s example
and pull out as well, he decided to destroy the union—the only po-
litical order he had ever known—rather than be stuck mainly with
non-Slavic republics. The three leaders agreed to announce the end of
the Soviet Union, telling Gorbachev only after calling Bush.BORN NUCLEAR
On independence, Ukraine immediately became a direct threat to the
West: it was “born nuclear.” The new state had inherited approximately
1,900 nuclear warheads and 2,500 tactical nuclear weapons. To be sure,
Ukraine had physical rather than operational control over the nuclear
arms on its territory, since the power to launch them was still in Mos-
cow’s hands. But that did not matter much in the long run, given its
extensive uranium deposits, impressive technological skills, and produc-
tion capacities, particularly of missiles; every single Soviet ballistic mis-
sile delivered to Cuba in 1962, for example, had been made in Ukraine.
Ukraine instantaneously became the world’s third-biggest nuclear
power, with an arsenal larger than those of China, France, and the
United Kingdom. (Two other new countries—Belarus and Kazakh-
stan—also inherited nuclear weapons, but not nearly as many.) Ukrai-
nian strategic weapons could destroy American cities. Determining