This is the script for my video posted on October 21, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine inherited custody of roughly 1900 strategic nuclear warheads. But they gave these up in exchange for security assurances from Russia, the US, and the UK, including a pledge to respect Ukraine’s borders and never use force against it. So would Ukraine have been invaded if they hadn’t given up those nuclear weapons?
To start, let’s explore why Ukraine had so many nukes to begin with. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was wary of the West and wanted as much territory as possible between their enemies and Moscow.
Ukraine sat on the western edge of the country, which made it a natural spot for tactical nuclear weapons and bombers meant for a war in Europe. It also became the heart of the Soviet missile industry. In 1951, a car factory in Dnipro was converted to build ballistic missiles, and it grew into one of the largest missile plants in the world. By the end of the Cold War, Ukraine both hosted Soviet nuclear forces and built many of the missiles that carried nuclear weapons.
Then, in April 1986, a reactor at the Chornobyl nuclear plant in northern Ukraine exploded. Radiation spread across Ukraine, Belarus, and much of Europe, and Soviet authorities’ early attempts to downplay the disaster turned it into a rallying point for Ukraine’s environmental and national movements. In 1990, Ukraine’s parliament froze construction of new nuclear reactors, though the country kept operating the ones it already had.
In July 1990, Ukraine declared sovereignty within the Soviet Union and, in the same document, pledged never to keep, produce, or acquire nuclear weapons. Ukrainians’ feelings about the Soviet Union itself were more mixed than you might expect, and in March 1991 about 70% of voters still backed preserving a reformed union.
But after hardliners tried to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev that August, Ukraine declared independence, and that December more than 90% of voters approved it.
Ukraine then co-founded the Commonwealth of Independent States, or CIS, with Russia and Belarus. But Ukraine treated the CIS not as a new union, but as a way to manage an orderly breakup. It refused to join the CIS’s collective security pact and never ratified its charter. Under CIS agreements, Ukraine began shipping its tactical nuclear weapons to Russia. President Leonid Kravchuk briefly halted the shipments in early 1992, but all of them were transferred by that May.
On 25 December 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned and handed the Soviet nuclear briefcase to Russia’s president, Boris Yeltsin. That gave Russia launch authority over the ICBMs and strategic bombers based in Ukraine.
Ukraine later asserted administrative control over those forces and even physically guarded the warheads, but it could not launch or even unlock them without codes from Russia. The most Ukraine’s president could do was share a spoken code with the commander of the missile army on Ukrainian soil that could block a launch, and that only worked as long as the commander stayed loyal.
In May 1992, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan all pledged to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty as non-nuclear states. Ukraine’s parliament spent the next two years haggling, and in 1994 the US, Russia, and Ukraine struck a deal: Ukraine would hand over its warheads in exchange for reactor fuel made from their uranium, US money to dismantle its missiles and silos, and security assurances.
Those assurances became the December 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Russia, the US, and the UK pledged to respect Ukraine’s independence and borders and to refrain from threatening or using force or economic coercion against it. But it did not commit anyone to defend Ukraine militarily, and it lacked any enforcement mechanism or consequences for a breach. Its only promise of action was to seek a UN Security Council response if Ukraine were attacked with nuclear weapons, and Russia holds a veto on that council.
The last strategic warheads left Ukraine in 1996. But less than 20 years later, Russia seized Crimea and started a war in the Donbas, sending in its own troops while denying it. In 2022, it launched its full-scale invasion. Vladimir Putin justified this partly as a response to NATO’s expansion, but he also denied that Ukraine was a real nation to begin with. Days before the invasion, he even claimed, without evidence, that Ukraine was trying to build nuclear weapons.
Most experts agree that, given enough time, Ukrainian engineers could probably have rewritten the launch codes and targeting on at least some of the missiles, though not everyone is convinced. That’s less far-fetched than it sounds, since the SS-24 was designed in Dnipro and built in Pavlohrad, and the SS-19’s guidance system came from Kharkiv. But there were a number of constraints that made it infeasible, beyond a public that leaned toward completely getting rid of nuclear weapons.
For one thing, the country had no source of tritium. I made a video on this recently, but suffice it to say that tritium decays, and without a fresh supply the warheads would have steadily lost their punch. The country also had no enrichment, reprocessing, fabrication, or testing capability, and warhead maintenance was done by Russian specialists.
Most of the missiles were liquid-fueled SS-19s designed and built in Russia with a service life of about ten years, and keeping them running depended on Russian engineers. Even if Ukraine could technically have kept the weapons, they were too expensive for the fledgling country to maintain. Ukraine’s second president, Leonid Kuchma, estimated that building a real arsenal would take at least ten years and $160 to $200 billion.
Beyond that, Russia had a lot of leverage. It cut gas supplies several times in the early 1990s and at one point threatened to cut them off permanently unless Ukraine met a list of demands, including returning all nuclear weapons. Ukraine depended on Russian gas to heat its homes and run its industry through long, brutal winters.
There was also a lot of pressure from the US to denuclearize Ukraine. The US didn’t want another nuclear power emerging from a collapsing empire, and Russia had refused to put the START I arms control treaty into effect until Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty. So the US partnered with Russia to insist on Ukraine denuclearizing, while offering money and closer ties with the West as an incentive.
If Ukraine had held onto the weapons anyway, there’s a good chance they would have been invaded by Russia in the 1990s, before they could secure a nuclear force of their own. They also would have been isolated by the West and barred from borrowing money, which would have been catastrophic for an already contracting economy. There’s no telling how history could have played out at that point.
Ironically, Belarus gave up its own Soviet missiles the same year Ukraine did, but under the authoritarian rule of Alexander Lukashenko it moved steadily closer to Russia. In 2023, Russia announced it had moved tactical nuclear weapons there, and in December 2025 it put its new nuclear-capable Oreshnik missile on combat duty in Belarus. Lukashenko says dozens of Russian warheads are now in the country, though Ukraine’s foreign intelligence service said in 2025 that only the launchers had arrived. Either way, the weapons and the decision to use them belong to Russia, which is essentially the arrangement Ukraine escaped in the 1990s.
Ukraine still has no realistic way to build a nuclear weapon today. A 2024 briefing paper claimed that Ukraine could build a crude bomb within months using about seven tons of plutonium from its spent nuclear reactor fuel. But Ukraine has no reprocessing plant to extract that plutonium, it shipped out the last of its highly enriched uranium in 2012, and International Atomic Energy Agency teams have been stationed at every one of its nuclear plants since 2023.
Its Foreign Ministry has also reaffirmed its commitment to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and building a bomb in secret would be extremely difficult in a country under constant Russian surveillance and strikes.
The bottom line is that trying to hold onto their nukes wasn’t a realistic path for Ukraine. The real mistake was settling for assurances instead of guarantees. Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry even drafted a treaty with binding security guarantees in 1993, but the US would only offer assurances, partly because the US Senate almost certainly wouldn’t have ratified a promise to go to war for Ukraine. Ukraine had little leverage to demand more, but that gap is exactly what Russia later exploited.
A December 2024 poll found that 73% of Ukrainians supported restoring the country’s nuclear weapons, though support fell to 46% if it meant losing Western backing and facing sanctions. Right now, Ukraine is negotiating for exactly what it didn’t get in 1994: security guarantees with real teeth. I think the world is far safer with nuclear weapons off the table in Ukraine, but only if those guarantees actually mean something this time.
Keep reading
- Why do nuclear weapons expire?
- How does Russia’s Kaliningrad survive surrounded by NATO?
- Why is Belarus dominated by Russia?
I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.