War in Ukraine: From Treaty to Treachery
Journal: SPIRE - Sciences Po Institutional REpository
Year: 2023

When Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022 [1], Russia was in breach of its assurances under the Budapest Memorandum, signed by Boris Yeltsin, on 5 December 1994 in Budapest. Consider some consequences and provisional lessons of the Ukraine-Russia War: (i) Do not relinquish nuclear weapons. No nuclear-armed state has ever been invaded; nuclear weapons have served as a deterrent. It is a counterfactual, but it is compellingly arguable, that a nuclear Russia would not have invaded a nuclear U