By Christopher Hyland
Saturday, March 21, 2026
On the evening of November 22, 1994, I sat in the White
House State Dining Room as President Clinton hosted Ukrainian President Leonid
Kuchma at a state dinner. Sandy Berger, then Clinton’s deputy national security
adviser and soon to be national security adviser, changed seats to sit beside
me. Over the next three hours, Sandy laid out what would become one of the most
consequential — and catastrophic — foreign policy decisions of the post–Cold
War era: Within 13 days, Ukraine would sign the Budapest Memorandums,
surrendering the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal to the Russian
Federation.
I told Sandy that night, as plainly as I could, that this
action was a path to war. Thirty years later, hundreds of thousands are dead,
and the path I warned of has been walked to its bitter end.
I was not a bystander to these events. As deputy national
political director of the first Clinton for President campaign, and later
political director of the Clinton transition, I had built the networks
connecting America’s ethnic communities — Ukrainian, Irish, Indian, Kosova, and
many others — to the incoming administration. I chaired the Clinton Transition
Conference on Eastern Europe. In his autobiography, President Clinton himself
wrote about my work organizing ethnic leaders “making an important contribution
to victory in the general election, and laying the foundation for our continued
unprecedented contact with ethnic communities once we got to the White House.”
Those communities were not ornamental. During the Cold War, their leaders had
functioned as quasi-governments in exile, and the intelligence they conveyed to
me was invaluable.
Before the dinner began, I found myself alone with the
Clintons and the Kuchmas in the Oval Reception Room. Not certain that Kuchma
had already committed to disarmament, I spoke directly to the Ukrainian
president: Ukraine, I said, should not give up its nuclear weapons if it wished
to safeguard its sovereignty against Russia. His stoic expression shifted,
however momentarily. Only later did Sandy confirm that the decision had already
been made.
Over dinner, as Clinton and Kuchma exchanged toasts,
Sandy outlined the architecture of the deal. Ukraine would relinquish every
nuclear weapon. In return, its security would be “guaranteed” by Russia, the
United Kingdom, and the United States. I pressed him on specifics. A
memorandum, I noted, is not a treaty. American soldiers would never be sent to
enforce it.
I reminded Sandy of the Holodomor — the deliberate
starvation of millions of Ukrainians by Bolshevik Russia in 1932–33 — and of
the decades of Soviet brutality that followed. I urged him to read Georgetown
Professor Lev Dobriansky’s The Vulnerable Russians, a primer on the relentless
imperial character of Russia, whether czarist, Bolshevik, or post-Soviet. I
warned that any provocation would expose a non-nuclear Ukraine to existential
danger.
To placate me, Sandy offered a vision. Ukraine would
remain neutral. It would not join the European Union. It would not join NATO.
It would remain unconnected to nuclear weaponry, open to investment from all
quarters, threatening no one.
“So you’re saying Ukraine becomes the Switzerland of
Eastern Europe,” I said. “No push to join NATO or the EU, open to investment
from all quarters.”
“Yes,” he replied.
It was a compelling vision. Though some of the parties
may not have realized it at the time, it was also a fiction. I already
suspected as much. In a prior conversation with Madeleine Albright — who would
become secretary of state in 1997 — I had come away with the distinct
impression that she envisioned all of Eastern Europe joining the EU and NATO.
Sandy’s promise of Swiss-style neutrality and Albright’s expansionist
trajectory could not coexist. One of them was ill-informed, or neither was
aware of the other’s Ukraine vision. Either way, Ukraine was being handed a set
of assurances that the American foreign policy establishment, in the event,
could not sustain.
After the dinner, walking back to our hotels through the
November chill, I turned to Bohdan Watral, then head of the Selfreliance Credit
Union in Chicago, and told him what I believed: that, however well-intended
decision-makers might have been, a path to war between Ukraine and Russia had
been set that night at the White House. I felt sick. There was no vision in
this undertaking, no noble intent — rather a shocking ineptness. Alexander
Kerensky, who had been head of the provisional Russian government in 1917, once
told me, in the Hall of Nations at Georgetown, that initially it took only a
handful of Bolsheviks to upend the massive Russian Empire. What I witnessed on
November 22, 1994, was a handful of political operatives — misguided at best —
condemning millions to suffering and upending centuries of Ukrainian hopes for
stable sovereignty, hopes then only recently realized.
The rest unfolded with grim predictability. Almost from
the moment its nuclear arsenal was relinquished, Ukraine — with robust American
and European encouragement — began moving toward EU and NATO membership,
directly contradicting every assurance Sandy had given me. A successful coup
was staged against an elected, pro-Russian Ukrainian president. War began in
2014. It escalated into full-scale invasion in 2022. Each chapter baited the
Russian Bear further. Was it prudent for Ukraine’s ambassador to Berlin to
announce massive industrial projects with Germany that completely excluded
Russia? Was it wise to cut off water to Crimea? Bullies must be managed with
finesse. This was never a Chamberlain moment — it was a failure of strategic
imagination.
McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy’s national security
adviser, once told me at a gathering at his home in Manchester-by-the-Sea: “We
could not have Russian missiles in Cuba threatening the Mississippi. Behind the
public discord, we were calmly negotiating.” In exchange for Soviet missiles
leaving Cuba, American missiles were quietly withdrawn from Spain and Turkey.
The crisis was resolved because both sides understood that great powers do not
tolerate existential threats on their borders — and because leaders on both
sides were willing to trade concessions out of public view.
By the same token, no matter how passionately Ukraine
agitated to shelter under NATO’s nuclear umbrella, Russia was never going to
accept nuclear-armed missiles a few hundred kilometers from Moscow. Kennedy and
Bundy understood this principle instinctively. The architects of the Budapest
Memorandums either did not understand it or did not care.
I have come to think of the Budapest Memorandums as the
Budapest Whisper — a promise made sotto voce, designed to sound like a
guarantee while committing to nothing. A memorandum, not a treaty. Assurances,
not obligations. Sadly, it was inherently flawed.
Decisions are often made under the guise of good
intention — sincerely supported by many — but for some in service of very
different, often convoluted ends. It remains for historians to dig deeper into
the whys and wherefores. One suspects that what they find will not be pleasing.
I have carried the weight of that evening for over three
decades. Having lived in Switzerland for three years, I understood what
neutrality could offer. Having visited Prague and Moscow as a 16-year-old in
1963, I understood firsthand the awesome, relentless gravity of the Russian
vortex. The Swiss model could have worked. It was never given the chance. Might
it still?
Pray for peace in Ukraine.
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