Serhii Plokhy and M. E. Sarotte
88 foreign affairs
a “cold peace.” Newly available documents reveal that this broadside
triggered a showdown in Washington just before Christmas 1994. U.S.
Secretary of Defense William Perry insisted on an audience with the
president to warn him that a wounded Moscow would lash out in re-
sponse to nato expansion and derail strategic arms control talks be-
tween the United States and Russia.
But Perry’s efforts were to no avail. As the removal of nuclear
weapons from Ukraine resumed after the signing of the Budapest
Memorandum, Ukraine became much less of a priority for Washing-
ton. Meanwhile, opponents of the Partnership for Peace, who wanted
to expand nato proper as soon as possible to a few select states rather
than build another, looser security alliance from the Atlantic to the
Pacific, gained new momentum thanks to the midterm election vic-
tory of the Republican Party, which was in favor of nato enlarge-
ment, in November 1994. Despite Perry’s efforts, Clinton made clear
to his secretary of defense that the United States would now proceed
with nato enlargement into central and eastern Europe.
Ukraine thus found itself increasingly, and dangerously, stranded: it
was both on the border of a truncated Russian empire forging dreams
of a comeback out of the humiliation of its recent defeat and outside
the emerging Western post–Cold War order. It had neither a berth
nor any clear path to one in either the main post–Cold War security
organization, which turned out to be nato rather than the Partnership
for Peace, or the eu. As a result, it struggled to democratize and fight
corruption and its own internal demons, as it languished in a kind of
gray area, a situation that became an invitation to Russian irredentism.
Ultimately, Ukraine’s struggle had repercussions beyond Ukraine—
indeed, repercussions for the post–Cold War order itself. Having
helped denuclearize Ukraine, Washington thought it could largely
stop worrying about the country, believing its independence to be an
accomplished fact. The reality was that Moscow never truly accepted
that independence, in part because it viewed Ukraine not only as a key
element of its former empire but also as the historical and ethnic heart
of modern Russia, inseparable from the body of the country as a whole.
The Budapest Memorandum could not paper over that disconnect
forever. Had the memorandum provided the guarantees of their coun-
try’s territorial integrity that the Ukrainians sought instead of mere
assurances, Russia would have met with much greater obstacles to vio-
lating Ukraine’s borders, including in Crimea and the Donbas. (An-