How Moscow and its allies are undermining the non-proliferation regime
The Russo-Ukrainian War’s global repercussions increasingly subvert the foundations of the international nuclear order.
January 23, 2025 -
Andreas Umland
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Analysis

Voevoda SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missile designed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War exhibited in Pobugskoe, Ukraine. Photo: Olga Savina / Shutterstock
The start and course of the Russo-Ukrainian War since 2014 have been principally shaped by the fact that Russia has, and Ukraine does not have, weapons of mass destruction. Oddly, this war-enabling situation is legitimized, codified and preserved by one of the politically most important and, with 191 signatory states, most comprehensive multilateral agreements of modern international law. The 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) allows Russia, as an official nuclear-weapon state, to build and acquire atomic warheads. At the same time, the NPT explicitly forbids Ukraine, as an official non-nuclear-weapon state, to do the same. Ukraine’s non-nuclear allies – from Canada in the West to Japan in East – are similarly bound by the NPT, as well as conventions on chemical and biological weapons, to their statuses as purely conventional military powers.
In its second article, the NPT postulates for all but five of its 191 signatory states, including Ukraine, that “[e]ach non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to receive the transfer from any transferor whatsoever of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or of control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; not to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices; and not to seek or receive any assistance in the manufacture of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.” The NPT thus prevented both Ukraine’s deterrence of, and defence against, the official nuclear-weapon state of Russia.
The 1994 Budapest Memorandum as an NPT appendix
Even more oddly, the emerging post-Soviet Ukrainian state possessed, in the early 1990s, the world’s third largest arsenal of nuclear warheads – an inheritance from the Soviet Union which broke up from August to December 1991. Immediately after Ukraine’s acquisition of independence, the number of its atomic arms was, for a brief period, larger than that of China, France and the United Kingdom’s weapons of mass destruction put together. Most Ukrainian and many foreign observers now admit that it was naïve of Kyiv to get rid, in the mid-1990s, not only of most, but of all its nuclear material, technology and delivery systems. At least, it was unwise to not demand in exchange a reliable protection mechanism like NATO membership or a mutual aid pact with the United States. Worse, many Ukrainian warheads, missiles, bombers, etc. were not destroyed in Ukraine, but transferred to – of all countries – Russia.
Instead of an alliance that could protect it, Kyiv received, in exchange for its voluntary nuclear disarmament, a written security guarantee from Moscow promising, in the now infamous Budapest Memorandum, to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and integrity. At the last summit of the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe, before it transformed into the OSCE, in Hungary’s capital in December 1994, the Russian Federation (RF), United States (US) and United Kingdom (UK) signed with Ukraine the fateful The short document duplicated two similar memoranda which were especially designed for the post-Soviet holders of parts of the former USSR’s atomic arsenal – Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Being the so-called “depositary governments” of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Moscow, Washington and London became in 1994 and are still today the guarantors of the borders of these three former Russian colonies and Soviet republics.
In their three Budapest Memoranda, the NPT’s depositary states assured Kyiv, Minsk and Almaty/Astana that they would neither pressure nor attack the three post-Soviet countries. That promise was given by the US, UK and RF in exchange for the agreement of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan to get rid of all their military nuclear capabilities, and to enter the non-proliferation regime as properly non-nuclear-weapon states. China and France, as the other two official nuclear-weapon states under the NPT, issued separate governmental declarations also assuring Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan of respect for their borders. Recently, this story has been masterfully detailed by Harvard’s nuclear historian Mariana Budjeryn in her award-winning book Inheriting the Bomb: The Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine (Johns Hopkins University Press 2022).
Security assurances or guarantees?
To be sure, the English-language titles of the three Budapest Memoranda speak only of “security assurances” from the NPT’s depositary governments for Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. This linguistic detail is sometimes taken to mean that the promises given by Washington, Moscow and London to Kyiv, Minsk and Almaty/Astana in 1994 were only semi-obligatory. Thus, the story goes, Russia’s manifest breach of its twenty-year old deal with Ukraine, when the Russian Federation annexed Crimea in 2014 along with many similar actions, is supposedly only a minor violation of some by now dated assurances and of the logic of the non-proliferation regime.
Yet, the Memoranda’s official translations that are most relevant today – namely, the Russian- and Ukrainian-language versions of the document – are markedly different from the English original. The Budapest Memorandum’s Russian and Ukrainian headings speak of “guarantees of security”. In Russian this is “o garantiiakh bezopasnosti” and in Ukrainian “pro harantii bezpeky”. The Russian and Ukrainian translations of the phrase “on security assurances” in the English version of the Budapest Memorandum, i.e. “o zavereniiakh bezopasnosti” or “pro zavirennia bezpeky”, do not appear in the titles of the Memorandum’s Russian and Ukrainian versions.
Washington and London thus indeed only “assured”, in Ukraine’s English-language version of the Budapest Memorandum, that they would not pressure or attack the post-Soviet country. In contrast, Moscow “guaranteed” Kyiv, in the document’s Russian and Ukrainian-language versions, the territorial integrity and independence of Ukraine. The Russian word for guarantees, in the prepositional case, reads “garantiiakh” while the Ukrainian word for guarantees, in the accusative case, reads “harantii”. If written in Cyrillic letters, these two words look sufficiently similar to assert that Moscow fully understood, in December 1994, that it was giving Kyiv guarantees rather than mere assurances of security.
Russian NPT subversion before the war
Russia started violating the Budapest Memorandum and the NPT’s logic already before the beginning of its war against Ukraine and occupation of Crimea in February 2014. For instance, Russia tried to infringe upon Ukraine’s state territory and border in 2003 with a unilateral and eventually abortive infrastructure project approaching the Ukrainian island of Tuzla in the Kerch Straits of the Black Sea. Ten years later, Moscow attempted to prevent Kyiv’s upcoming conclusion of an already initialed Association Agreement with the European Union. Throughout 2013, it exerted heavy economic as well as political pressure on Kyiv – a kind of behaviour explicitly forbidden by the Budapest Memorandum’s third article.
It may also be worth reminding that Russia began already in the mid-1990s, long before Putin’s star in Russian politics started rising, to manifestly violate the logic of the non-proliferation regime in the post-Soviet space. Moscow did so with regard to another European successor state of the USSR, the Republic of Moldova, which did not receive a Budapest Memorandum but, like Ukraine, acceded to the NPT as a non-nuclear-weapon state in 1994. In that year, Chisinau also signed an agreement with Moscow on the withdrawal of Russian troops from, and on the dissolution of, the Moscow-supported unrecognized “Transnistrian-Moldovan Republic” in eastern Moldova. Thirty years later, neither of these obligations of the nuclear-weapon-state Russia vis-à-vis the non-nuclear-weapon state Moldova has been fulfilled.
A similar story has, since the late 2000s, been ongoing in Georgia, which had also acceded, in 1994, to the NPT as a non-nuclear-weapon state. At the end of the five-day Russo-Georgian War of August 2008, Russia signed with Georgia a ceasefire agreement. The so-called “Sarkozy Plan” obliged Moscow to withdraw its troops from Georgia. Yet, Russia left, in violation of its 2008 promise, a large part of its regular forces on Georgian state territory. Moreover, Moscow recognized two separatist regions of Georgia, Abkhazia and “South Ossetia” (i.e. Georgia’s Tskhinvali Region), as independent states – in obvious contradiction to the logic of the non-proliferation regime in which Russia and Georgia both officially participate.
To be sure, the continuing infringement of the territorial integrity of Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine is primarily determined by Russia’s larger conventional, rather than its high nuclear, military power. Yet, Moscow’s possession of atomic arms, as well as Chisinau, Tbilisi and Kyiv’s non-possession of WMDs, has been an important background factor in the Kremlin’s expansive behaviour for 30 years now. Without its large nuclear military capacity, Russia would have had to be far more cautious with its permanent deployment of conventional forces in countries where its troops are not wanted.
Moreover, Moscow’s aggressive actions were – contrary to the Kremlin’s loud claims – only partly related to Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine’s international or/and internal affairs. Russian troops are stationed illegally on the territories of, on the one side, the official NATO aspirants Georgia and Ukraine as well as, on the other side, the officially neutral Republic of Moldova. The latter can, according to its still valid Constitution of 1994, neither enter NATO nor allow foreign troops on its land. The Russian occupations of Transnistria, Abkhazia and “South Ossetia” have continued independently of the geopolitical stance of Moldova and Georgia’s governments in the past or today. Whether the leaderships in Chisinau and Tbilisi have been communist or nationalist, and whether they have been friendly or adversarial towards Moscow, has had little effect on Russia’s illegal occupation of official Moldovan and Georgian state territory. That was and is in spite of these territories being covered by the NPT and numerous other security-related treaties to which Russia, Georgia and Moldova are parties.
A similar story goes for Russia’s behaviour towards Ukraine. Many observers forget today that Moscow intensified its non-kinetic “hybrid” warfare against the Ukrainian state already before 2014 and started the military capture of Crimea as early as February 20th, 2014. During these periods of time, the Ukrainian state was headed by the loudly pro-Russian politician Viktor Yanukovych. The Moscow-friendly president of Ukraine was still in full power when Russia was exerting, throughout 2013, heavy economic as well as political pressure on Ukraine to not sign an Association Agreement with the EU. This was in spite of Moscow’s, as well as Washington and London’s, obligation in the Budapest Memorandum to “[r]efrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind”. Yanukovych was also still in office when Russia began, in February 2014, illegally occupying Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula – an action also forbidden by the Budapest Memorandum. Yanukovych left his presidential office, the city of Kyiv and eventually Ukraine for Russia only after Russian regular troops without insignia had started conquering south Ukrainian state territory by force.
How Moscow put the NPT on its head
Since February 2014, Russia has not only ever more ruthlessly attacked Ukraine by military and non-military means with regular and irregular forces. Moscow has been also violating ever more unashamedly and demonstratively the security guarantees it gave to Kyiv in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Moscow’s actions have thereby been increasingly contradicting and even reversing the logic of the non-proliferation regime in place since 1970.
The NPT is today, together with similar conventions on biological and chemical weapons, a central part of the post-1945 UN-based global security system. Apart from its written regulations, the NPT’s implicit function is that of upholding the borders of non-nuclear weapon states – especially so vis-à-vis the five officially nuclear-weapon states. In its introduction, the NPT is “[r]ecalling that, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, [those] States [that have signed or acceded to the treaty] must refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations […].” Circumscribing temporary possession of atomic arms to five countries that also happen to be permanent members of the UN Security Council (“the P5”), the NPT is tasked with reducing the risk of inter-state war in general, and the use of nuclear weapons as instruments of expansionist foreign political affairs in particular.
As the legal successor to the USSR, a founder and depositary state of the NPT, and the explicit guarantor of the inviolability of Ukraine’s borders in the Budapest Memorandum, Russia has now put the purpose of the non-proliferation regime on its head. The NPT’s exception for the Russian possession of nuclear weapons has helped Moscow to conduct its expansionist and genocidal war against Ukraine. The NPT’s prohibition of the Ukrainian possession of nuclear weapons has also prevented Kyiv’s effective deterrence and defence against the Russian onslaught since 2014.
The NPT enabled Moscow to threaten not only Ukraine but also its allies – especially the non-nuclear ones – with atomic annihilation and nuclear winter. This is especially true if they continue to assist the Ukrainian resistance against Russia’s unashamed territorial enlargement and continued terror against civilians. The NPT’s authorization of the Russian possession of nuclear weapons has had, in the past, and will have, in the foreseeable future, the effect of inhibiting military support for Ukraine from international law-abiding countries. This inhibition concerns both the provision to Ukraine with, and the permission to use, certain particularly effective conventional military technologies, such as Germany’s Taurus cruise missiles. It has also stopped the deployment of allied troops on Ukrainian territory, whether they are sent by NATO, the EU or an ad hoc coalition of Ukraine-friendly nation-states.
If Kyiv had, in 2014, owned nuclear weapons, Russia would most probably not have attacked Ukraine and thereby risked an erasure, by a Ukrainian nuclear response, of entire Russian cities – as happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. If Moscow had, on the other hand, not possessed nuclear weapons in 2014, Ukraine’s western allies would most probably have come quickly to Kyiv’s help. A coalition of the willing would likely have liberated, in 2014-15, the illegally annexed Crimean Peninsula and occupied parts of the Donbas in the same way in which a US-led coalition, in 1991, liberated Kuwait that had been occupied and annexed by Iraq the year before. The rules established by the NPT have thus facilitated both the start of Russia’s territorial expansion and genocidal war in 2014, and the subsequent unwillingness of the international community to resolutely reverse Moscow’s initial land capture, prevent Russia’s further expansion, and forestall the ongoing genocide in Ukraine.
Conclusions and policy recommendations
The nuclear non-proliferation regime went into force in 1970. It has since drawn its legitimacy from being an encompassing agreement that helps to limit the emergence and escalation of wars, as well as prevent the use of nuclear weapons for expansionist aims. Yet, it is today generating rather different effects in connection with Russia’s annihilation war on, and capture of land from, the NPT signatory state Ukraine. Since 2023, these corrosive effects have been further aggravated by the increasingly direct involvement of North Korea, as a nuclear-weapon state outside the NPT and a non-signatory of the Chemical Weapons Convention, in the Russo-Ukrainian War. Being forbidden by the NPT to have atomic arms, Ukraine is now being attacked by two countries that – more or less, legally – possess nuclear weapons.
Moreover, Russia is assisted in its subversion of the non-proliferation regime, in one way or another, by additional signatory states of the NPT. The official nuclear-weapon state China and the – at least, for now – non-nuclear weapon state Iran are actively helping Russia in its war efforts via the provision of military, dual-use, or/and non-military help. China manifestly contradicts, with its support for Russia’s war, its “Statement of the Chinese Government on the security assurance to Ukraine issued on 4 December 1994”. In this historic document deposited with the UN General Assembly, Beijing had assured Kyiv, in connection with Ukraine’s decision to become a non-nuclear-weapon state under the NPT and the signing of the Budapest Memorandum, that China “fully understands the desire of Ukraine for security assurance. […] The Chinese government has constantly opposed the practice of exerting political, economic, or other pressure in international relations. It maintains that disputes and differences should be settled peacefully through consultations on an equal footing. […] China recognizes and respects the independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of Ukraine.”
Belarus has signed its own Budapest Memorandum with the US, UK and Russian Federation in 1994. Nevertheless, Belarus allows Russia today to station and operate not only conventional troops but also nuclear weapons on its territory. Minsk thereby and in many other ways assists Moscow in its attack on Ukraine. The country also contributes to undermining the ideas behind the NPT and the Budapest Memoranda.
Being, like North Korea, a nuclear-weapon state outside the NPT, India rhetorically supports Ukraine, unlike North Korea. Yet, India has become a major trading partner of Russia since 2022. New Delhi thus too indirectly contributes to the corrosion of international trust in the logic of non-proliferation.
Obviously, the functioning and future of the NPT are closely linked to the course, results and repercussions of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Considering the clear relevance for humankind of a continuation of the non-proliferation regime, the following six policies can be recommended to actors interested in its defence:
- All signatory states of the NPT concerned about its preservation should provide the non-nuclear weapon state Ukraine with, as much as they can, military and non-military support, enabling Kyiv to achieve a convincing victory on the battlefield and the liberation of its territories currently illegally occupied by Russia.
- All signatory states of the NPT concerned about its preservation should demand from Moscow an immediate end to its threats of a nuclear escalation, as well as warn Russia and its allies that such an escalation would trigger a resolute military and non-military counter-reaction from them.
- All signatory states of the NPT concerned about its preservation should effectively sanction and publicly condemn the nuclear-weapon states Russia and North Korea as long as they continue waging an expansionist war on the territory of the non-nuclear-weapon state Ukraine. The same mechanism should apply with regard to Russia’s continued occupation of parts of the non-nuclear-weapon states Moldova and Georgia.
- All signatory states of the NPT concerned about its preservation should insist on a just peace for Ukraine, including the full restoration of its territorial integrity; full preservation of national sovereignty; full return of all prisoners of war and deported civilians including children; and full compensation for Ukraine’s destruction via Russian reparations.
- All non-governmental organizations, businesses and individuals favouring a continuation of the non-proliferation regime should support, with whatever means they have, Ukraine’s victory and recovery, as well as publicly oppose and sanction Russia and North Korea with all the instruments available to them.
- Washington and London have, as depositary governments of the 1968 NPT and as signatories of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, special responsibilities vis-à-vis Kyiv. The United States and United Kingdom should therefore offer Ukraine a transformation of their 30-year-old security assurances into a mutual aid pact. A tripartite, fully-fledged military alliance would protect Ukraine until it becomes a member of NATO, and also allow the international utilization of increasing Ukrainian war-related know-how and resources. All other signatory states of the NPT should be invited to join this trilateral defence treaty and to thereby contribute to upholding the logic of the non-proliferation regime.
A shorter version of this article was published by “The National Interest,” in December 2024.
Dr. Andreas Umland is an analyst at the Stockholm Center for Eastern European Studies (SCEEUS) of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (UI).
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