1994 Budapest Agreement

In February of this year, I posted an article regarding Ukraine and Russia regarding the likelihood of Russia attacking Ukraine to artificially elevate oil prices.  I am still quite surprised that Putin did not attack, because his country is suffering economically; but it looks like he decided that the risk of escalation and expansion of a focused conflict was too great.  Given this new reading the Budapest Memorandum, he probably was not sure that the U.S. would even respond militarily, which would have defeated the purpose of that stunt entirely.

Today, I found a copy of the Budapest Agreement of 1994 made between the Presidents of Ukraine, Russian Federation and United States of America, and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

The article stipulating territorial integrity was written with regards to not attacking Ukraine or violating their territorial integrity, which Russia unquestionably violated.  However, I misread the section regarding the U.S. guarantees of maintaining the territorial integrity of the Ukraine.

The actual excerpt of the agreement reads as such:

a4. The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirm their commitment to seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine, as a non-nuclear-weapon State party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used; (bold mine)

Which effectively only says this: "In the event that Ukraine is attacked or nuked, we will talk about it in the UN."  Obviously, there were probably some non-legally binding assurances that were probably relayed to the Ukrainians along the lines of: "Of course the UN will back you up." but this was not written into the agreement.

So, I was incorrect in my assessment of the situation based on a misinterpretation of the 1994 Budapest Agreement.  Apparently, the 1994 Budapest Agreement does not bind us in guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Ukraine.  It is an important nuance that I missed in my initial read through of this agreement.