It was helpful for Sky News to 'explain' to its readers that Russia has a history of breaking deals:
According to our military analyst Michael Clarke, Russia has broken 190 deals.
One of the most important for Ukraine was the Minsk Agreements in 2014, signed in an effort to end fighting after Russia invaded Crimea in February that year.
Their analyst then goes on to say this about the 'deal' when Ukraine gave up its Soviet nuclear weapons:
The biggest one of all, I suppose, was 1994, the Budapest Memorandum, which is when Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons that it had inherited from the old Soviet Union, and Ukraine was the one country that could have used them," Clarke added.
"I mean, the other countries were Kazakhstan and Belarus. They couldn't really have done anything with the weapons that they inherited. But Ukraine had the expertise.
"They could have had their own nuclear force that would have worked if they chose to, but they gave it up in 1994, in return for security guarantees."
[https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-russia-talks-saudi-arabia-trump-putin-call-zelenskyy-live-sky-news-latest-12541713]
As usual this kind of 'explainer' is slightly economical with the facts and context. But it's Sky News so who cares?
As we know from documents obtained by the US National Security Archive, if Ukraine had used these weapons, they would have been targeted at US assets and it doesn't seem clear if they even had possession of the launch codes anyway.
So this famed nuclear arsenal that Ukraine 'gave away' was very likely a load of past-their-sell-by-date Soviet warheads, targeted at (now) the wrong people, that couldn't be fired anyway. A disaster waiting to happen in other words.
Furthermore, the documents show that Ukraine at the time neither had the money nor the expertise to maintain these weapons and anyway the positive US support for the deal was clearly in support of their own and Europe's interests and not Ukraine's: the USA certainly did not want another nuclear state in Europe and a volatile one at that.
As Stanford University CISAC states in Budapest Memorandum Myths (3/12/24):
Third, Ukraine sought security guarantees. The United States and Britain were prepared to provide security assurances but not “guarantees,” as the term implied a commitment to use military force. The U.S. government would not provide such a guarantee. In any case, it is doubtful the Senate would have consented to ratification of such an agreement.
[https://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/news/budapest-memorandum-myths]
If there had in fact been security guarantees, as Clarke claimed, then the current proxy war could easily have become a 'hot war' as both the USA and UK would have had to honour their 'deal' commitments and counter the Russian SMO in 2022 with forces of their own.
The USA and UK clearly knew the 'art of the deal'. So it's hardly surprising that today's Trump administration is also not keen on 'security guarantees' either. They are presumably aware of the history.
But security assurances - not guarantees - were only a part of a hard bargain driven by Ukraine at the time, as the archive explains in: The Budapest Memorandum 1994 After 30 Years... by referring to declassified U.S. documents published on the anniversary today (5/12/24) by the National Security Archive.
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The blowup occurred simultaneously with one of the most significant achievements of U.S.-Russian-Ukrainian cooperative threat reduction: the signing of the Budapest Memorandum with Ukraine on disposing the deteriorating Soviet arsenal of nuclear weapons based in Ukraine. The documents show that Ukraine bargained hard for a trade very much in its own national interest, where the 1000+ nuclear warheads left in Ukraine, each a mini-Chernobyl in the making, would be re-processed in Russia for fuel rods that provided electricity in Ukraine for the next decade, in a sequence lubricated with funding from the American Nunn-Lugar program.[1]
The security assurances in the Budapest Memorandum, signed by the other nuclear powers at the highest political level as part of the deal with Ukraine, only lasted 20 years, until Russia violated those pledges (and its other treaty commitments under the Helsinki Final Act and the UN Charter) by seizing Crimea in 2014 and then invading Ukraine in 2022.[2]
In hindsight, critics of the Budapest Memorandum inaccurately describe the Soviet warheads as Ukraine’s “nuclear deterrent” against Russia, when the documents show those weapons were targeted on the U.S. and could not be maintained safely in Ukraine. One leading Russian expert advised Yeltsin in September 1994 against offering any inducements to the Ukrainians because the warheads were already rotting: Soon, “Ukraine itself will be asking us” to take the warheads “and it will have to pay for the transfer.” (See Document 2)
The Ukrainian Academy of Sciences had already concluded that Ukraine could not afford the billions necessary for a nuclear fuel cycle that would prevent decay of the warhead fissile material, especially in the face of inevitable international sanctions such as those placed on North Korea.[3] Ukraine’s oil and gas debts to Russia at the time had already reached $5 billion, according to documents from the Russian Duma, and more than half of that would be forgiven as part of the Budapest deal. (See Document 8)
[https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nato-75-russia-programs/2024-12-05/budapest-memorandum-1994-after-30-years-non]
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Clearly it can be argued that Russia first broke this 'deal' by re-annexing the Crimea in 2014 (it was originally annexed by Russian Tsarina Catherine the Great in 1783) but even this statement ignores a lot of other 'deal breaking' that occurred between 1994-2014 including, for example, NATO's eastwards expansion, the loophole of stationing 'rotating' NATO forces in the Baltic states, deposing an elected government in Ukraine via a right-wing backed coup and the farcical Minsk agreements about which a key European signatory, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, later said in an interview published by Die Zeit on December 7, 2022:
The 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give Ukraine time,” Merkel told the weekly Die Zeit. “It also used this time to become stronger, as you can see today.”
Some deal for anyone to adhere to, let alone Russia.
The archive documents referenced above were only exposed as the result of a FOIA request in the USA, otherwise they may never have seen the light of day - but reducing deep historical complexity to 'they' break lots of deals and by implication 'we' do not is not only childish but mischievous given the seriousness of the situation right now with peace talks on a knife edge.
Real world history is seldom crystal clear and sometimes never truly known but surely Sky News readers deserve a little better?