Was Ukraine's Nuclear Disarmament a Blunder?

By now, it is a well-known story: in the early 1990s, Ukraine surrendered the world's third largest nuclear arsenal inherited from the collapsed Soviet Union in exchange for security assurances from nuclear weapons states, which Russia glibly violated by annexing Crimea and fueling the war in eastern Ukraine. Unquestionably, Russia's breach of its security commitments to Ukraine has regrettable consequences for the international nonproliferation regime and international security order more broadly.

Yet, behind the near-universal and well-deserved opprobrium of Russia's aggression, the story of Ukraine's denuclearization has gelled, in Ukraine and elsewhere, into a facile narrative that omits important facts....

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