The Budapest Memorandum in 1994: when Ukraine renounced its nuclear weapons in order to guarantee its independence

Immediately following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Belarusthe Kazakhstan and theUkraine, find themselves with old Soviet nuclear weapons on their territories. Following the fall of the USSR, Ukraine even became the world’s third nuclear power.

In this context, the United States and the other great powers, including Russia, wish to avoid at all costs the proliferation of nuclear weapons throughout the world. In order to achieve this, in 1991, the three former Soviet republics and Russia signed the Lisbon Protocol, stipulating that all the nuclear weapons of old Soviet Union on the soil of these four states would be destroyed or transferred to Russian control.