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History As It Happens
World War Ukraine
00:50:08
Thirty years ago, in early December 1994, at a security summit in Budapest, the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, and Ukraine signed a memorandum in which Kyiv agreed to eliminate all nuclear weapons left on its territory after the collapse of...
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- [00:00]
Martin DeCaro
History as it happens. December 6, 2024 World War Ukraine.
- [00:06]
Bill Clinton
Ukraine's move is a major step toward ensuring that nuclear missiles never again will be targeted at the children of our nation.
- [00:14]
Michael Kimmage
In exchange, world powers promise to respect Ukraine's existing borders and sovereignty.
- [00:19]
Bill Clinton
But the independent Ukraine of today is at the very heart of Europe.
- [00:24]
Boris Yeltsin
We are lucky that an attempt of expansion of totalitarian political structures to assault against the human, human rights, values and freedoms of civilization was a failure.
- [00:37]
George Bush Sr.
The Cold War days are over.
- [00:38]
Bill Clinton
The Cold War is over.
- [00:40]
George Bush Sr.
The Cold war is over.
- [00:41]
Martin DeCaro
Thirty years ago, early December 1994, Russia under Yeltsin, the US and the United Kingdom agreed to assure the independent sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine. Today, Russia under Putin wages war in Ukraine, occupying most of its eastern territory. Its international consequences growing from post Cold War peace to Europe's largest hot War since 1945. But can we call it a world war? All of it? Next with Michael Kimmage as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
- [01:15]
NATO Representative
We are concerned about the changes that are taking place in NATO. What is this going to mean for Russia?
- [01:23]
George Bush Sr.
In Bucharest, we must make clear that NATO welcomes the aspirations of Georgia and Ukraine for their membership in NATO.
- [01:29]
Michael Kimmage
Unarmed protesters dumbed down in the streets by the riot police who were retreating from Kiev's Maidan Square. This is a Russian invasion. The US Says it has no doubt.
- [01:39]
Ted Cruz
These are Russian forces.
- [01:41]
Joe Biden
Russia's decision to send troops into Crimea has rightly drawn global condemnation.
- [01:49]
Boris Yeltsin
There is nothing, I think, in the range of possible Western reactions that will persuade President Putin to withdraw.
- [01:58]
Michael Kimmage
No, I don't think he sees it as a tragedy. I'm sure he is aware of the mismanagement that's there in the war. But the war is too important for Putin. For him to allow himself to believe that it's failing doesn't mean that the war can't fail. But he will not believe it until the very last moment. And of course, dictatorships insulate leaders from bad news.
- [02:24]
Martin DeCaro
The scene is the White house Lawn, autumn 1994. A state visit by Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma. He and President Bill Clinton delivered remarks imbued with the earnest aspirations of the early 1990s. With the Soviet Union gone, in Eastern Europe free, what was once impossible now seemed within grasp.
- [02:52]
Bill Clinton
To have you here with us today, Mr. President, is to be reminded that we live in an era of wonders. A time when people's long denied hope are having age old dreams fulfilled. A time when the unstoppable power of men and women who wish to be free has been demonstrated anew.
- [03:11]
Boris Yeltsin
An epoch of the global confrontation of two political systems with enormous military risk and economic wastefulness is over. We are lucky that an attempt of expansion of totalitarian political structures to assault against the human rights, values and freedoms of civilization was a failure.
- [03:46]
Martin DeCaro
Amid the optimism, everyone involved was aware of the difficulties. Ukraine and Russia's economies were a mess and avoiding nuclear proliferation remained an urgent priority.
- [03:56]
Bill Clinton
You have blazed a path ahead on the two most critical issues for the future, economic reform and nuclear weapons. Thanks to your leadership, Ukraine is making the hard choices that will ensure.
- [04:12]
Martin DeCaro
So. Just weeks later, on December 5th and 6th, at the conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe held in Budapest, Ukraine, Russia, the United States and United Kingdom signed a memorandum where Ukraine agreed to eliminate all the nuclear weapons within its borders, its inheritance from the collapse of the ussr, in exchange for assurances. Not a treaty, not a guarantee, assurances from the other signatories Reading from the memorandum here to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine. Here's Boris Yeltsin through an interpreter at a news conference after the signing.
- [04:50]
Michael Kimmage
Our expectations came perfectly true. Promptly, we've signed an agreement with Ukraine to eliminate all of Ukraine's nuclear weapons. Their nuclear weapons will be shipped to Russia for destruction.
- [05:07]
Bill Clinton
We also agreed that the sovereignty and.
- [05:09]
George Bush Sr.
Independence of Russia's neighbors must be respected.
- [05:12]
Martin DeCaro
The Budapest attendees had a lot of other business to tend to, including the future of NATO. What Clinton announced about the alliance and how Yeltsin responded would also augur future trouble.
- [05:23]
Bill Clinton
NATO will not automatically exclude any nation from joining. At the same time, no country outside will be allowed to veto expansion.
- [05:33]
NATO Representative
NATO was created in the time of the Cold War. Today, not without difficulty, it is seeking its place in the new Europe. It's important that this quest should not give rise to new zones of demarcation, but should rather consolidate European unity. This logic, in our view, is contradicted by NATO's plans for expansion. Why sow the seeds of mistrust? After all, we are no longer enemies.
- [06:02]
George Bush Sr.
We invited all the republics of the former Soviet Union, all the Warsaw Pact nations and the other non NATO members of Europe to be part of the Partnership for Peace. All were invited. All were told that this can also lead to eventual membership in NATO, but that our objective is to create an undivided and united Europe, united around political freedom, economic freedom, military cooperation and respect for one another's borders. For the first time in the history of the nation state. It has never happened before. And we, and I think we share.
- [06:39]
Martin DeCaro
That vision in late 1994, a major land war between Russia and Ukraine must have seemed a distant possibility, if not a crazy idea, given everything else that was going on then, including the bloody civil war in Bosnia. 20 years later. War did arrive as Russia, under Putin, annexed Crimea and soon after invaded the Donbas in the name of assisting pro Russian separatists there. But what about the Budapest memorandum? Well, Ukraine never forgot about it, but those assurances were hard to enforce. The US would sanction Russia and eventually arm Ukraine, but Washington would not go to war with Russia.
- [07:17]
Joe Biden
We're not going to go to war with Russia. The Ukrainians don't want that. We don't want that.
- [07:22]
Martin DeCaro
So I was a bit surprised as I was preparing this podcast to learn that just two years ago, Texas Senator Ted Cruz invoked the Budapest memorandum during a speech on the Senate floor.
- [07:32]
Ted Cruz
Under the terms of it, Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear weapons. Ukraine had the third largest stockpile of nuclear weapons on the face of the planet. America agreed quite reasonably the world would be safer if Ukraine did not have nukes. And the brand new Ukrainian government agreed and gave up their nuclear weapons, making America safer and the world safer. But the Ukrainian government did not do so for nothing. It did so in exchange for explicit assurances that the United States would protect Ukraine's territorial integrity.
- [08:09]
Martin DeCaro
Now, Cruz got some of his facts wrong. Ukraine never legally possessed the nuclear arsenal left on its territory after 1991. But the US has helped Ukraine avert collapse with money and weapons since the major Russian invasion in 2022. In the meantime, non European states have been assisting Moscow. As historian Michael Kimmage writes in an essay in Foreign affairs, the official publication of the Council on Foreign Relations. Kimmich and co author Hannah Noether say as the war drags on, non European countries are becoming more and more involved. Some are giving Russia the means to prolong the war men and munitions by using Ukraine as a testing ground. They hope that they'll be better prepared for wars they themselves may fight in the future. North Korea's decision to deploy thousands of troops to help Russia reclaim embattled Kursk region is just the latest example. They go on to say other non Western states are trying to shape the course of the war or positioning themselves to be present at the creation of a post war Europe that is to be at the table for the negotiations that will end the conflict, however distant that prospect may be. Amid this terrible war, they write, non European states are turning Europe into an object of their foreign policy. Many commentators have said that the precedent set by Russian victory In Ukraine, a nuclear power seizing another country's territory at will. Will would transform the global order. The deep involvement of powers outside Europe adds another layer to the war's transformative potential. Europe, having projected its power outward for centuries, is becoming a theater for the projection of non European power. Brussels, Kyiv and Washington will have to come to terms with this new reality, they say. And I'll share a link to this essay in my weekly newsletter. You can sign up@historyasithappens.com the essay's title is How Ukraine Became a World War. Now think of that for a minute. A war of global repercussions being fought in Europe 30 years after the leaders of the US Russia and Ukraine would regularly meet at summits and envision a peaceful, prosperous, democratic future together.
- [10:15]
Bill Clinton
I might also add that a democratic Ukraine supports the idea of a democratic Russia, which is best for Russia, Ukraine and the United States.
- [10:27]
Martin DeCaro
But then, as now, an unresolved question. Will Moscow? Can Moscow allow an independent Ukraine to exist? Historian Michael Kimmage is the Richard C. Holbrooke Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Welcome back to the podcast.
- [10:42]
Michael Kimmage
Great to be back with you, Martin.
- [10:44]
Martin DeCaro
Hello from Berlin. Well, I'm in Washington. You're in Berlin.
- [10:48]
Michael Kimmage
Exactly. Hello from Berlin.
- [10:50]
Martin DeCaro
It's great to have you back. So anniversaries do have a way of concentrating our minds on a subject. They can help us in our quest for some perspective on current events. And what I'm getting at here is early December, December 5th and 6th, actually, 30 years ago, 1994, the CSCE met in Budapest for a summit where President Clinton had some remarks about NATO expansion that Boris Yeltsin did not appreciate. But for Ukraine, there was an importance to that summit that had nothing to do with NATO. It was the signing of the Budapest memorandum. Why is the Budapest memorandum relevant to what's happening today?
- [11:31]
Michael Kimmage
Well, it's not maybe hugely relevant. Other than that it's a poignant point of demarcation, and one that is, of course, now that we approach in the spirit of regarding a historical artifact. So in diplomacy, in international affairs, a memorandum is very far from a treaty, and it's not especially binding, which was not a secret at the time. At the time, the Budapest Memorandum was a commitment on the part of the U.S. russia and a handful of other powers to ensure respect and guarantee the territorial sovereignty and integrity of Ukraine. So one thing that's interesting about that in 1994 is that this was felt to be possible. And there was such a spirit of optimism at the time that the signatories I think did all of this in good faith. And so that's just interesting again from a historical vantage point. Secondly, I think what the Budapest Memorandum signifies is not so much that the west was deeply committed to the security of Ukraine, which It wasn't in 1994 and didn't really approach being until 2022. What it signifies, the Budapest Memorandum is the end of a particular moment in the post Cold War period where the top priority of the United States was nuclear non proliferation, which goes back even to 1990 in the end phase of the Soviet Union. The famous Chicken Kiev speech that George Bush senior gave in Kyiv where he urged the Ukrainians to go slowly.
- [12:44]
George Bush Sr.
Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.
- [13:01]
Michael Kimmage
So what Ukraine had done in the early 1990s was to give the nuclear weapons it had on its territory to Russia. That was part of the deal. And in return it got the Budapest Memorandum, which turned out to be not worth much more than the paper it was signed on. But you know, we can go back in time and look at all of these trend lines in a way marvel at how different that time was from our own.
- [13:19]
Martin DeCaro
To me, the reasons why the Budapest Memorandum is important today is because the underlying issues today are the same or were the same issues then. And that is really an underlying issue, the post Soviet relationship between two new states, if you will. I mean, Russia is not a new state, but you know what I mean, no more ussr. So would Russia be entitled to what it viewed as its natural hegemony over Eastern Europe, as you know, across the political establishment in Russia at the time, even though Ukraine had voted, its parliament had voted for independence at the end of 1991, Russians, including Boris Yeltsin, never fully accepted it. And we're still there today, aren't we?
- [14:04]
Michael Kimmage
Well, in a way, yes. In a way, no. I think you're absolutely right that Russia regarded Ukraine then as a sphere of influence, as it had for the duration of the Soviet period, 1917 to 1991, and of course back deep into imperial Russian history, you could say until the middle of the 17th century century, when Ukraine and Russia, or parts of Ukraine and Russia were first joined together into a political unit. But I think what makes that period really so distinctive and in a sense so different from our own in ways that I don't know if it really anticipates what comes later is that Boris Yeltsin's Russia was sincerely committed to integration into Europe and integration into some kind of transatlantic set of relationships, certainly not joining the NATO alliance in the 1990s, which wasn't on offer to Russia, and I don't think was Yeltsin's ambition either. But Yeltsin really saw Russia as a European country, and in his eyes, he was bending over backwards to accommodate the Western idea of economics and the Western idea of security, Western idea of culture, and bringing Russia into that world, I think with the checkered enthusiasm of many Russians themselves. And I think a lot of Europeans at the time looked to Russia and thought of, well, this is a country that's got its problems, it's poverty, and it has a different history from ours, but it's sort of joining our world in a certain sense. And we can debate the career of Vladimir Putin. But what I think is not debatable is how radically far Putin has taken Russia from this vision. So certainly seeds of discontent are planted in the early 1990s about NATO and about what European security is going to look like. But it's within the framework in the 90s of Russia's integration into Europe. And that's, you know, it's a historical matter. It's not happening at all in the present moment, but it's a really key point.
- [15:41]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, that's a great point to make about what is different between then and now. Another issue that I think might. Might link the two periods is what should Ukraine's relationship be to the West? So every oblast, as they're called, every oblast in Ukraine voted for independence in 1991, including Crimea, including the eastern parts of Ukraine that have larger ethnic Russian populations. Every single one. But there were, of course, strong economic ties with the Metropol, if you will, because of the history of the Soviet Union. Right. The links in the economy, cultural connections. And while NATO expansion wasn't an issue really then, not in regards to Ukraine, there were economic issues, Black Sea fleet, nuclear weapons. So all of this was in play. And within Ukraine itself, even though they did vote for independence, this was a difficult issue, was it not? Where do we go now? Do we have to have a close relationship with Russia? Or we can. Or maybe we should seek out better relationships with the west, as we call it.
- [16:43]
Michael Kimmage
Yeah, no, those are all really, really important points. I mean, I think one technicality, maybe, not that you misstated this in any sense, Martin, but one technicality is when the independence vote was conducted, it was independence from the Soviet Union. A very similar vote occurred in Russia itself. It, too, left the Soviet Union and also In Belarus, you had a push to leave the Soviet Union. It was not leaving Russia in 1991 because there was no Russia to leave. And I'm not sure what that vote would have looked like if it had been a kind of Russia, Ukraine vote. It might have had a different outcome. But it's absolutely clear that Ukrainians wanted to be freed from the Soviet Union, wanted to be out of that world, and wanted to be independent of that. But with that, exactly as you suggest, Martin, came a host of extremely complicated questions as to how all these states, individual states, I believe there were 14 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, 14 new states, how they were to function. And to be honest, if you were a Ukrainian politician or a citizen at the time, we're sticking with the early 1990s. Your primary concern was just how to make a living. It's like the bottom dropped out of the society, the political economy, and people who had been university professors became taxi drivers and, you know, other people who expected to have apartments because of the old system didn't have a place to go or to live. So the economic times were unbelievably hard. And this is true in Belarus, it's true in Russia, it's true in Ukraine. So geopolitics, in a way, was secondary at the time for all three of these newly created countries. They were really trying to figure out how to make things work. And what's also clear at that time, you know, again, a kind of different note from the one that you would strike at the present moment. But at that time, the cross fertilization, the cross connection, the interpenetration of Russian and Ukrainian worlds was immense, in part because these are neighboring countries, in part because you have millions upon millions of intermarried families, but also because that's what the Soviet system was. And so for the gas pipelines, the transportation networks, the folkways, et cetera, were very, very intertwined because of the Soviet period. So it was a break from the Soviet Union. Soviet Union vanishes overnight. And yet all of these countries are a part of a similar set of structures. And that, in some ways, is going to really complicate the story of Ukrainian independence. The country is independent, it has a flag, it has a nation state, it has its own political structures, but it's still post Soviet in so many ways, as are Belarus and Russia. And that's just part of the very complicated 1990s mix.
- [18:59]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, it complicates the picture immediately because there is something called the Commonwealth of Independent States. And the question was, well, is Russia going To have a federal role, or is this a confederation? Or is it none of that. It's just something we call a commonwealth. But Ukraine gets to act totally independently within this commonwealth. So again, the question of Russian hegemony in Eastern Europe, sometimes I pronounce that word hegemony, sometimes I pronounce it hegemony. Don't hold it against me. But, you know, Russia wanted to dominate certain aspects of this trade, monetary policy, other issues as well, right?
- [19:34]
Michael Kimmage
Yes. Not least of which is corruption, which often ran through former KGB ties, because it was former KGB who had access to capital and access to information and were kind of elites in the Soviet period. And so they rise up. Of course, Putin is the most significant member of that former cadre of KGB officials, but these figures and former military form a lot of informal networks. And again, Belarus is part of the picture as well. Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. So in a certain sense, from Moscow's point of view, and again, I would underscore the point that for Moscow, for Kyiv, for Minsk in the 1990s, economics was paramount, and Russia goes through a terrible economic crash in the late 1990s. And that's really what was worrying people, even to the extent that people didn't have enough food to eat and things like that. But beyond that, it's not as if Ukraine was entirely outside of a sphere of influence for Russia, it was kind of informally within a certain sphere of influence that because of the corruption, because of the financial ties, because of the energy ties, because of the former military intelligence ties, it's as if Russia has a huge number of levers, levers of influence within Ukraine. And you want to superimpose upon that a Ukrainian polity that all the way until the election of Zelensky 2019, when the. When the mood changes. But from 1991 to 2019, Ukrainian polity tends to go back and forth. It vacillates. You know, it leans to the east, it leans to the west. More sort of Russia friendly, more Europe friendly, not in a linear way, but in an almost cyclical way. And there too, it's sort of like Russian influence waxes and wanes. But there's always the expectation when a Westernizer comes, that the Westernizer is going to be followed by some kind of Russophilic figure. And that pattern did recur all the way again up till 2019. So you sort of put those two points together, that economics is the dominant issue. And in terms of a chaotic post Soviet picture, Russia has a lot of levers of influence within Ukraine. It amounts to something loosely resembling a sphere of influence. So it's maybe not great, it's not ideal for Russia, but it's a pretty tolerable state of affairs.
- [21:28]
Martin DeCaro
And that back and forth is something you document in your excellent book, Collisions about Russia's war in Ukraine, the origins of it. We've discussed the book on the podcast in the past. So when it comes to economics, right, Ukraine's economy, as you said, was in bad shape in the 1990s. And one thing the Ukrainian political establishment hoped to gain by ceding its nuclear weapons, which were never truly Ukraine's nuclear weapons, they were the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons. By agreeing to cede the weapons, that Ukraine would be monetarily compensated for that. Returning again to the Budapest Memorandum, it enters the non Proliferation Treaty as a non nuclear state. It all goes back to Russia to be dismantled and destroyed. And Ukraine then is supposed to be. Well, it doesn't get guarantees. It's not a treaty. It gets assurances about its territorial integrity. So leaping ahead a little bit here, Michael Kimmage, when Russia annexed Crimea illegally in 2014, really invaded it, Right. Did anyone invoke the Budapest Memorandum other than say Ukraine?
- [22:32]
Michael Kimmage
Yeah, I mean, we want to just briefly mention 2004. You have something called the Orange Revolution in Ukraine responding to a rigged election. Ukrainians went to the streets and the election result was changed. And instead of the more pro Russia guy winning, it was more the pro Europe or the pro west guy who won. And one of the inside Kremlin officials at the time, I've forgotten the man's name, describes this on the Russian side as hour 9 11. So a kind of massive wake up call about something that's going deeply wrong in the region that did not elicit a military response from Russia in 2004. But you want to sort of factor that into the larger trajectory of events. So chaotic 1990s that more or less worked for Russia 2004 as a trend line that in Moscow is perceived as negative. And then 2014, of course, the annexation of Crimea and gradual Russian incursion into Eastern Ukraine or the Donbas at this time, the Budapest Memorandum is constantly invoked, but it's invoked by only one country. It's invoked in the present day still. The Budapest Memorandum is invoked by Ukraine, which is outraged at the violation of its territorial integrity and sovereignty, and outraged in two directions. Of course, Russia as the aggressor has sort of waltzed in in 2014 and taken territory. But at the same time, the west responds to Russia's annexation of Crimea with sanctions. But certainly not with military action. And so it makes the Budapest memorandum seem in a way, nothing more than what it almost transparently was at the time, which was a kind of nice rhetorical flourish and a verbal commitment to something, but, you know, a kind of agreement with no traction, no teeth, and in a sense, almost no significance. So in the way that appeasement signifies betrayal for a generation of Europeans, the Budapest memorandum signifies a betrayal for a generation of Ukrainians.
- [24:09]
Joe Biden
We're not going to go to war with Russia. The Ukrainians don't want that. We don't want that.
- [24:14]
Martin DeCaro
At the time, Clinton, Yeltsin, Kuchma, who is the Ukrainian president, I mean, they may have imagined that at a future date there might be Russian military action against independent Ukraine. But at the time, did that seem palpable on its way, given the language in the memorandum, they must have thought it was possible, maybe in a distant type of way.
- [24:34]
Michael Kimmage
You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. The psychological field around the Budapest memorandum, I think with really all the powers involved, including Ukraine, the field is that there's maybe some potential aggressor out there, I don't know, Turkey, China, you know, sort of who it would be that might threaten the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine. So already a kind of very low probability threat or danger. But the presumption was not Russia. Obviously, you know, Russia wouldn't sign onto a document preventing itself from doing something that it intended to do. I mean, we have to recall, shockingly, that the war is really unthinkable. The big war between Russia and Ukraine is unthinkable for many Europeans, Ukrainians and Russians all the way down to the morning of February 24, 2022. So if it's unthinkable at that late date, when you have Russian soldiers massed around Ukraine, when you have the annexation of Crimea incursion into the Donbas eight years in the past, if it's unimaginable in 2022, it's totally unimaginable in the 1990s. So, yes, it was a sincere commitment to a problem that was sincerely believed never to really manifest itself. So it's a very odd, or maybe not so odd, but it's a perplexing, confusing text.
- [25:39]
Bill Clinton
Ukraine's move is a major step toward ensuring that nuclear missiles never again will be targeted at the children of our nations. I told President Kuchma that the United States will continue to work with Ukraine to dismantle completely its nuclear arsenal.
- [25:55]
Martin DeCaro
And it has led some now to second guess Ukraine's decision to give up Its again, its nuclear weapons. But people have to remember at the time, the Ukrainian political establishment, with a couple of notable exceptions, wanted to rid itself of the nuclear arsenal because it could be monetarily compensated. And then of course, it would get these assurances that in exchange for doing this, you would leave us alone. And the second guessing stems from, well, if Ukraine had nuclear weapons, no way any country would invade it.
- [26:24]
Michael Kimmage
There's one other wrinkle in the whole problem. For a country, it's not sufficient to have nuclear weapons. To have nuclear capability, you have to have a whole system and it's expensive and takes a lot of technology and needs to be constantly updated. So for Ukraine to have become a nuclear power, which it was not in 1994, to have become a nuclear power would have involved a huge investment in new technologies, new infrastructure and all of that. So they could have kept the old weapons and integrated into a new system. But that would have been a very, very big decision on Ukraine's part. It would have been costly and they would have incurred the wrath of Washington because whether it's George Bush Sr. Or Bill Clinton, American presidents did not want Ukraine to become a nuclear power for the very understandable reason that one country of the size and stature of Ukraine, in a sense bucking the non proliferation status quo at the time, would have considered a pretty radical act. And the idea was it would have opened the door to other powers becoming nuclear. Iran, North Korea, et cetera. And so all of that would have been a very negative trend line. So Washington really put pressure on Ukraine. Basically said, if you want to have a decent relationship with us, you've got to get rid of the weapons. That too made it very, very hard for Ukraine to take the step of not remaining, but of becoming a nuclear power.
- [27:33]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, we have to go back in time to restore the urgency of the moment. And remember, for those of you who weren't alive then, I guess you can't do this, but I was alive then and I kind of sort of remember, I was a teenager. The urgency of making sure all those nuclear weapons that the Soviet Union used to possess did not wind up in the wrong hands or lead to new nuclear states. Proliferation was a major issue and it's still a major issue today.
- [27:57]
Michael Kimmage
But actually, you know, just to link up two parts of our conversation, one of the reasons that Washington is so eager to see NATO expansion, when it is eager to see NATO expansion, which is sort of the mid-1990s, is that there is a concern that if NATO doesn't expand to the eastern and central parts of Europe that these countries will become nuclear powers. So Poland, for example, could independently become a nuclear power. And then you would have potential for tension or conflict between Poland and Russia. So the U.S. is really, this is a, you know, it's maybe a bit of a forgotten issue now, but is really trying to manage this. This whole dynamic of the European state structure after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dynamics of nuclear weapons and non proliferation is really almost the paramount aim in much of this for Washington.
- [28:37]
Martin DeCaro
You mentioned NATO there. I said at the top of the conversation at that summit in early December, 30 years ago, the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe in Budapest, that's where Bill Clinton made remarks about coming NATO expansion that irritated Boris Yeltsin. But we don't have time or the bandwidth to get into that entire history as well, because I promised Michael Kimmage that we would move on to connecting what happened 30 years ago to what's happening today vis a vis your essay in Foreign affairs, co written with Hannah Nota, who was unable to join us for this podcast. She's traveling. Before we get into that essay, I'm just going to let everyone know that the book they can read about Ukraine's nuclear inheritance is called Inheriting the Bomb by Mariana Bujarin. I had her on the show, talked to her about the book. Excellent book. Concise history of Ukraine's nuclear issues after the fall of the Soviet Union. Okay, so your Foreign affairs essay, you refer to what's happening in Ukraine as a world war. You do not mean a world war in the true sense of that term, as in it's being fought all over the world. It's being fought in two places, Ukraine and a small part of Russia. So what do you mean by world war?
- [29:46]
Michael Kimmage
Well, just that the war is increasingly becoming the world's war. Certainly Not World War I or World War II in scope or magnitude, thank God. A war with an interesting paradox at the heart of it. And the paradox is that the war is fiercely local. And this is the war that we read about every day, where villages and towns are taken along the line of contact in the Donbas or Kursk oblast in Russia, where it's a game of kilometers and meters with again, a kind of profoundly local dynamic on the one hand. And on the other hand, a war that is absolutely global in nature, which of course doesn't mean that there are huge global power blocs that are fighting directly on the battlefields of Ukraine, but indirectly fighting for sure. And so of course, this is integral on the Ukrainian side that There's a coalition of countries, and it's not just a transatlantic coalition. It includes South Korea, Singapore, Japan, New Zealand and Australia. These are all countries that in different ways are funding and supporting the Ukrainian war effort. Russia doesn't have countries that are doing that on its side, but Russia has a huge network of relationships that have been determined by the war. And so you have China providing markets to Russia that allow Russia to fuel its war effort, but China is also allowing dual use goods to flow in across the border. And perhaps there are more direct forms of military assistance that China is giving to Russia. So China is, in a sense, building its own leverage within the war. And as we've learned recently, there are troops directly in the war from North Korea and perhaps from Yemen as well. And since the beginning of the conflict, you have Iran supplying Russia with materiel and also building drone factories in Russia itself. And so whether it's the war, war, the military components of the war, whether we're trying to understand that, or it's the diplomacy, we need to really think in a kind of global way about this war. It's not going to be determined alone by decisions in Washington, by decisions in Moscow or decisions in Kyiv. It's a much more complicated and varied tapestry of interest groups and actors in this conflict. And I think we are probably in the US not as aware as we should be of the growing leverage of non European powers in a European theater. And that's one of the things that makes this war somewhat novel in nature. We could go back to the Russo Japanese War of 1905 and other moments when you have direct collision between European and non European powers. But. But that too is the story of this particular war.
- [32:08]
Martin DeCaro
Well, it flips history on its head because Europe had always been meddling in the affairs of countries outside its borders, and now we have the opposite in a way, happening today. It's not a direct comparison, but it sounds like you're saying that non European countries like China or whoever are seeing an opportunity for them in the war. They're not just supporting Russia out of ideological brotherhood, if you will. They see something that could be gained for them even materially, diplomatically, politically here because they assume that Russia may come out on top.
- [32:40]
Michael Kimmage
It's either that. I don't know what the exact assumption is in that regard. I mean, I think from where the war stands at the present moment, it doesn't look like Russia is going to lose. It's hard to predict that Russia is going to win outright, although that's one of several possibilities. But In a sense, win or lose, it makes sense to have leverage within a conflict of this magnitude. It makes a lot of sense for China, and I actually wouldn't want to paint it in overly paranoid or conspiratorial colors in the case of China. China's a large country. It's got a large economy. It's determined that it does not want Russia to fail in this conflict. And at the same time, China has lots of interests that concentrate around within, near the territory of Ukraine. The whole Belt and Road initiative of China extends from China in many directions, but also to the southeast of Europe in Athens, and transportation and commercial networks that run from China to the south to the Balkans and. And Ukraine is at the center of that picture. So it's, of course, natural that China would want to have some stake in war termination. And when it comes time for the peace table to materialize, and there will come a time, probably at maybe 20 years from now, but that time will come. China wants to be at it. And how do you get at the table? It's not by requesting politely, it's by being a factor within the war itself. Now, North Korea and Iran are not going to be at the table when the war has concluded. That's, I think, very unlikely. They have somewhat more specific, particular reasons for investing in this war because they want Russian support on other agendas and initiatives and because it gives them certain benefits. But in terms of a new geopolitics, the country to really watch in this regard is China. And it makes a lot of sense, of course, what China is doing. In Chinese terms, it makes a lot of sense what China is doing.
- [34:15]
Martin DeCaro
We've been talking about the war since it began on the podcast, and I remember talking to you, and I was hardly breaking any news here, and you know this as well. The longer wars go on, the more they destabilize, the more they escalate. As a somewhat informed and distant observer here, maybe some people feel like I have no right to say this because I'm not Ukrainian and it's not my country that's been invaded. But since, I don't know, maybe after the first four or five, six months of the war, it became evident to me that a negotiation was going to have to happen at some point for those very reasons. The longer the war has endured, the more outside interference. It has opened the door for outside interference to take place and potentially escalate the war in a dangerous direction. But you also say that the limitations of Western policy have opened the door to this new reality. What did you Mean?
- [35:06]
Michael Kimmage
Well, you know, the west commands enormous resources, and the west has, in aggregate, unbelievable military capacity, vastly greater than Russia's military capacity, but for reasons that are political and in their own right, quite understandable, although maddening from the perspective of Ukraine, the West has chosen to limit what it's giving to Ukraine. So the rhetoric of the west at the beginning of the war in the first year, the second year was quite expansive. You know, a rhetoric of victory.
- [35:33]
U.S. Official
Russia invaded. It wasn't just Ukraine being tested. The whole world faced a test for the ages. Europe was being tested. America was being tested. NATO was being tested. All democracies are being tested. And the questions we faced were as simple as they were profound. Would we respond or would we look the other way? Would we be strong or would we be weak? Would we, the all of our allies would be united or divided? One year later, we know the answer. We did respond. We would be strong, we would be united, and the world would not look the other way.
- [36:17]
Michael Kimmage
But in terms of actual provision of materiel and, of course, troops are off the table. But that's a decision. There are lots of constraints and limits. And so I think that this has been noticed, and what that means is that there is open space to try to determine the outcome of the war. This is not the 1990s, when the US enjoyed such military superiority, that really it was the only factor when it came to conflicts with. With Serbia and other countries. And I don't think anybody at that time would have felt comfortable challenging the US in terms of what it wished to do in the Balkans or in other theaters. That's just very, very different now. And you can see that playing out directly in the war in Ukraine. But I did want to go back for a moment to something that you said about negotiations, just because I see things a little bit differently from the way you do. Martin, I don't know about the inevitability of negotiations on the basis of Russian gains in the war. I think it's crucial when we think of negotiations, and since we have a new administration coming to Washington that is promising to negotiate on this issue, it's a really important one to bring out into the open and to discuss. I think the question of negotiations ultimately depends on what the will or ambition or what the plan is in Moscow. And if the plan is still to partition the country, sort of 50, 50, you know, to dominate Ukraine in some big way, to lop off Odessa and have complete access to the Black Sea and the Russian occupied territories, if that's the Russian ambition, as I suspect it is. I don't think that there are many prospects for negotiations because I just don't think that Ukraine can agree to that. And even if the US Would be willing to take that step, in a sense, to welcome and to sanction the partition of Ukraine into a Russian colony and a kind of rump Ukrainian state, this wouldn't be accepted by the Baltic republics, by Poland, by the Scandinavian countries, because they would see themselves as in the crosshairs next. And so you would probably get a transatlantic rift. But. But I just don't think that negotiations can succeed if Russia's ambitions are still very big. That's an open question. I don't have good evidence one way or another about what Putin's thinking is or what Russia's thinking is. So it's very much one that can be explored. But if Russia is as adamant about controlling Ukraine as it was on the eve of the war, I think negotiations are going to be really tough.
- [38:20]
Martin DeCaro
Well, I hate to get into hypotheticals here, but if Russia were to be satisfied with what you just said there, the Donbass, which it still has not entirely conquered nearly three years into the war, although it has been making gains over piles of rubble. And then you said also Odessa, access to the Black Sea, etc. Obviously it's holding on to Crimea. If Russia were to be temporarily satisfied. I said temporarily satisfied with that because there's always a possibility of the war starting up again in the future. What alternative is there for Ukraine? Continue to fight and they're running out of men.
- [38:55]
Michael Kimmage
Well, they still have huge parts of their population that they have not mobilized. And of course, you're absolutely right. In the end, it's a decision for Ukrainians to make because it's not you or I who are losing family members or ourselves on the battlefield. So I would hate to talk tough in the absence of credibility on that point.
- [39:14]
Martin DeCaro
True. But although Ukraine does rely almost entirely on the west for its weapons and budget. But go ahead.
- [39:19]
Michael Kimmage
That's true. There is a great reliance on outside sources of support, but there's definitely leeway in terms of the manpower issue. But you flip the question around and the question is, I think if you would concede that amount of territory and if you would deprive Ukraine of access or rump Ukraine of access to the Black Sea country would not be very economically viable. The question is whether you're not just ensuring the suicide of Ukrainian statehood, not maybe next year, but two, three, four years from now, because I think what Russia would also insist on for there to be A deal, a negotiation is not just a huge amount of territory, more than they currently occupy and control, but they would insist on some kind of demilitarization. So obviously NATO membership would be off the table. But any kind of standing army or significant military presence on Ukrainian soil, on the soil of a rump Ukraine, would, I think, be intolerable in Moscow's eyes. So you'd be asking for a kind of you give half the territory of your country to a foreign entity, you demilitarize yourself. The question then is not really whether Russia would reinvade. It's just a question of when and when Russia would be able to fully terminate Ukrainian statehood. So I don't think any country can really agree to that. You're right. It's the Scylla on the one hand of a terrible war and the Charybdis on the other hand of an unacceptable peace. And it's between those two things that Ukraine is currently trapped. But in my view, it's not trapped between a viable set of negotiations and an impossible war. It's in a sense a worse dilemma than that.
- [40:40]
Martin DeCaro
Well, Ukraine would have to tip the scales on the battlefield in its favor again to get a better negotiating position. And right now that looks like a difficult task. It is still holding on to parts of Kursk, a small sliver of Russia, but it's holding onto that as a bargaining chip. Not that Ukraine doesn't want to take over part of Russia, but this comes back to, and I know you've heard me say this before, what President Obama said in that interview he gave to the Atlantic in 2016, that Ukraine will always be more important to Russia than the West. This stinks for Ukraine. It gets to choose its future under the terms of the liberal rules based international order. But that's not the reality. And you mentioned NATO there. That's something that Zelensky wants, right? He could potentially negotiate an end to the war. This is his most recent idea, which would leave Russian forces in Eastern Ukraine in exchange for NATO membership. But we know from history, Michael Kimmage, that the West, United States, Britain, France, Germany has never wanted to die for Ukraine, which is what NATO membership means. This was floated in 2008 by George W. Bush. And there's a reason why his idea of having Ukraine and Georgia join NATO at that summit in 08 never went anywhere because the other countries in NATO didn't want to do it.
- [41:55]
George Bush Sr.
Here in Bucharest, we must make clear that NATO welcomes the aspirations of Georgia and Ukraine for their membership in NATO and offers them a clear path forward. To meet that goal.
- [42:07]
Michael Kimmage
Yeah. No, I think it's kind of a non starter, all of this in terms of where things are going to go. Because if we are speaking of a negotiated settlement, I don't think there's any way Moscow would agree to NATO membership for a rump Ukraine. Nor as you're suggesting, would there be much of a will in Germany, not to mention Hungary, Slovakia, Turkey, not to mention the United States. Whether under a President Biden or a President Trump, there's not going to be much appetite for speeding Ukraine's path to NATO membership. So I don't think that NATO is the answer to the problem, despite Ukrainian and other peace plans that have put this idea forward. I think what's being discussed now is, to me a more plausible venture is that there would be a European peacekeeping force in Ukraine that's not occupied by Russia. And so Ukraine would be willing to sort of tolerate an armistice or a ceasefire if they were to get a peacekeeping force of European soldiers. And there are European countries that are seriously discussing that. It wouldn't be Article 5, it wouldn't be NATO, it would be something different. So I think that that's a kind of work in progress. And I wouldn't be surprised if the Trump administration would pick up on that idea because I think it would like the optics of Europeans taking the risk of Europeans making the sacrifice, of Europeans putting themselves in harm's way, but not of the US Being the direct guarantor of Ukrainian security.
- [43:18]
Martin DeCaro
Is Russia's capacity to continue the war indefinitely being overestimated? Just reading an article where interest rates in Russia are now at their highest point, 21%, the Russian Central bank, highest point since the Soviet period to tamp down inflation.
- [43:33]
Michael Kimmage
We don't know the answer to this question. Genuinely, we don't know. I mean, there's been a huge drop off in journalism. It's very hard for any independent Western journalist to go to Russia and do reporting on exactly this question. So if reporting could yield the answer, we don't have that resource. Let me just offer you two different answers to the question, Martin. By way of conclusion, I'll start with the more conventional one and then conclude with the more unconventional answer to the question. The conventional answer to the question, probably the better answer to the question, is that Putin has what he needs to go on with this war for a very long time. Gdp, defense spending in Russia is about six and a half percent. That's higher. But if you look at US Cold War history, which I know that you're a great consumer of Martin, you know, GDP spending on defense in the US at the beginning of the Cold War could be as high as 12, 13, 14%. So, you know, it's not like Russia is ruining itself by its defense expenditures. And its wartime spending has, as often as the case, and I'll come back to this point in a moment, has juiced the economy. So Russians have lots of job opportunities and there are ways to make money. And that has even had an effect outside the big and affluent cities. And, of course, Russia is a dictatorship. So, you know, people's willingness to go out in the streets and overturn a dictatorship, they might be willing to go out and protest. But to really do something that would threaten Putin's hold on power, that's hard to envision at the moment. And Russia is very, very far from that point. There are not even inklings of that happening at the present moment. And it's not clear to me that Russians want to lose the war, even if they have their concerns about Putin and about the economy. I would describe the mood in Russia as anti, anti war. And so that, too, gives Putin the political foundation on which to fight the war. So I think anybody doing serious policy planning in the US has to assume that Russia is going to be at this war for years, if not for decades to come. On the other hand, you want to be careful about making predictions that are too sweeping. The economy is overheating, wartime economies are tricky to manage, and Russia's economy is a very limited economy in some ways. I mean, very dependent on gas and oil sales abroad, which can fluctuate and there could be exogenous shocks in Russia. But we do know that after Russia looked kind of impregnable in terms of its domestic political setup, we had a mutiny in Russia in the summer of 2023 that was based on the discontent of soldiers. So that was not registering outside the west. But it was real. That was the Prigozhin mutiny. And we do know from many cases, I mean, Syria might be one at the very present moment, but we have ample evidence of this from the historical record, that dictatorships are stable until that magical moment when they're no longer stable. And then you can't put the genie back in the bottle. And I don't think Russia's on the cusp of that. But wars induce a kind of pressure on societies. They do. I mean, there's loss, there's suffering. And this war in particular, because, let's put it this way, a point that doesn't get enough attention at the present moment, when we're all looking at the difficulties that Ukraine has, and they're losing territory, they're struggling, they're on the back foot. All of that, of course, is empirically true. But Russia has expanded unbelievable amounts of manpower and materiel to go from 11% control of Ukraine to maybe 18, 19% Ukraine. The one city that Russia has taken over the course of almost three years is the city of Mariupol, which was completely ruined and is now being resettled by people from Russia. If that's a successful war, I don't know. I'm baffled by the image of that, the reality of that as successful. So that's a tricky thing for Putin to balance. The Putin dictatorship that he's created economies that can get out of kilter, and then a war effort that has to just be burdensome for Russians. They can ignore it, they can pretend that they're winning, they can believe the state propaganda. But there are other truths under the surface. And if these things begin to coalesce, the dictatorship, the economic woes and the war, we can go back to Russian history and the loss of the war to Japan in 1905. The loss of the First World War, which was followed also the Crimean war in the 1860s, was followed by periods of political turbulence and unrest. So we can't take that out of the picture, even if it's extremely difficult to predict at the moment.
- [47:28]
Martin DeCaro
On the note of not knowing what we don't know, how predictions are difficult. Putin is 72. What I'm about to say, I'll preface it. I don't know this to be a fact, but he does see himself as a historical actor striding across history here. He lost a brother in the Second World War, in the siege of Leningrad. To him, three years of war compared to what the Soviet Union once had to go through to prevail in the 1940s. Maybe he's seeing this is not the way we see it, although you are right, it is a tragedy for Russia, what has happened. He obviously doesn't see it that way.
- [48:03]
Michael Kimmage
No, I don't think he sees it as a tragedy. I'm sure he is aware of the mismanagement that's there in the war. But the war is too important for Putin. For him to allow himself to believe that it's failing doesn't mean that the war can't fail, but he will not believe it until the very last moment. And, of course, dictatorships insulate leaders from bad news, from negative assessments, and are very good at inspiring wishful thinking on the part of leaders which is probably the exact frame of mind that Putin is in, on the one hand, looking at some of the things that are going his way, on the other hand, indulging in wishful thinking. So, yeah, I can't imagine that he would change gears himself. It would have to be pressure from somewhere else in the Russian polity for him to not to do that, but to feel threatened in his power.
- [48:43]
Joe Biden
Now we're taking these steps as part of our response to what Russia has already done in Crimea. At the same time, the world is watching with grave concern as Russia has positioned its military in a way that could lead to further incursions into southern and eastern Ukraine. For this reason, we've been working closely with our European partners to develop more severe actions that could be taken if Russia continues to escalate the situation. As part of that process, I signed a new executive order today that gives us the authority to impose sanctions not just on individuals but on key sectors of the Russian economy. This is not our preferred outcome. These sanctions would not only have a significant impact on the Russian economy, but could also be disruptive to the global economy. However, Russia must know that further escalation will only isolate it further from the international community.
- [49:44]
Martin DeCaro
On upcoming episodes of History As It Happens, we're going to put events in Syria, the former Soviet republic of Georgia, and the US Economy in historical perspective. Sorting out the order of those upcoming episodes as I speak. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday. My newsletter every Friday. Sign up free at History as it happens dot com.