I

The Hall of the Order of St. Catherine is the most intimate of the five staterooms within the forbidding walls of the Grand Kremlin Palace. Lacking the martial character of the Hall of the Order of St. George, and the gilded ostentation of the Hall of the Order of St. Alexander Nevsky, the Catherine Hall, formerly the throne room of the Romanov empresses, retains a Rococo charm all its own. Its vaulted ceiling is supported by pilasters adorned with inset slabs of malachite, its walls are studded with rhinestones, and its glistening parquet floor shows off the complex geometric patterns designed by the academician Fedor Solntsev — all decorative features that delicately reflect the light cast by the crystal chandeliers and bronze ceiling lamps suspended above. On the wall and the main doors are inscribed the words За Любовь и Отечество, “For Love and the Fatherland.” Here the visitor is greeted by the acceptable, and deceptive, architectural face of Muscovite absolutism, in which the militarism, the grandiosity, and the heroic scale of the other ceremonial halls are temporarily set aside in favor of more refined sensibilities, making this room a fitting venue for foreign diplomatic receptions.

It was in the glittering and harmonious Catherine Hall, on Jan. 14, 1994, that Russian President Boris Yeltsin received his American and Ukrainian counterparts, Bill Clinton and Leonid Kravchuk, on the momentous occasion of the signing of the Trilateral Statement, which laid out the terms by which newly-independent Ukraine would transfer its nuclear arsenal to Russia. President Yeltsin began his remarks in an exultant tone, gratified as he was that the agreement had “put to rest one of the last problems of the Cold War,” thereby cementing “the global regime of non-proliferation.” He then offered the floor to President Clinton, who graciously turned to President Kravchuk. The Ukrainian leader, in a very brief statement, confirmed that “there is no alternative to nuclear disarmament,” and that his country would “take the stable path,” something his nation’s tortuous, even torturous, history had long prevented.

Then it was President Clinton’s turn. “This agreement,” he declared, “makes the world safer and each of our countries more secure. I am especially pleased to see the development of progress between Ukraine and Russia. As both President Yeltsin and President Kravchuk said to me separately, it is in Russia’s interest for Ukraine to be stable and strong and it is in Ukraine’s interest for Russia to be stable.” He then pointed to his necktie. “It says carpe diem, seize the day, and you have done exactly that. I am convinced that in times of change, those who survive are those who seize the day. We have all said enough. I think we should go sign the agreements.” The three leaders exchanged letters spelling out each party’s solemn commitments, clasped their hands together, smiled for the cameras, and made their way into an adjacent hall to put pen to paper.

Later that evening, Clinton attended a 24-course dinner, including moose lips in a succulent wine sauce, held at Yeltsin’s official dacha. The banquet’s host tentatively raised the possibility of the Russian Federation joining NATO — “Russia has to be the first country to join NATO, then the others from Central and Eastern Europe can come in” — and advanced the notion of “a kind of cartel of the United States, Russia, and Europeans to help to ensure and improve world security.” Clinton’s response was diplomatically non-committal, though he did recognize a growing Russo-American “relationship of trust and confidence” that “could guarantee the countries of Europe a century of peace or more.” At which point the American president, true to form, broke out his tenor saxophone.

II

The studious cordiality of the Moscow signing ceremony masked the fact that the entire affair had been something of a near-run thing. On the very eve of the summit, Leonid Kravchuk had voiced second thoughts about Ukraine surrendering its nuclear warheads because the Ukrainian people, 92.3 percent of whom had just voted in favor of independence a few years earlier, might object to such powerful weapons being handed over to their former oppressors. During a courtesy stop in Kyiv on the way to Moscow, Clinton had warned his Ukrainian counterpart that a withdrawal from the non-proliferation process would lead to dire consequences for Ukrainian-American relations. Cooperation, on the other hand, would enable Ukraine to become the third leading recipient of American foreign aid after Israel and Egypt. Kravchuk relented immediately. Ukrainian accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons was, however, dependent on the security “assurances” (which are different than “guarantees,” according to State Department lawyers) contained in the Budapest Memorandum, which was signed on Dec. 5, 1994. According to that political agreement, the Russian Federation, the United States, and the United Kingdom all agreed to “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine,” to “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine,” and to “refrain 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.”

Ukraine, which for centuries had been partitioned, torn asunder, and exploited by neighboring empires, could finally rest easy knowing that its sovereignty and territorial integrity were recognized and backed by international law and binding international instruments. Two decades later, the memorandum would be weighed on the scales of global geopolitics and found wanting, to say the least, but in the meantime Ukraine acted in consummate good faith, committed as it was to follow the “stable path.” Its nuclear weapons stockpile, the third largest in the world at the time, was duly liquidated, and its air force gutted. Eleven Tu-160 strategic bombers and 27 strategic Tu-95 bombers were destroyed, alongside nearly 500 Kh-55 air-launched cruise missiles, and at a Feb. 2, 2001 ceremony held at the Pryluky Air Base in north-central Ukraine, American and Ukrainian defense officials looked on with satisfaction as the last of Ukraine’s strategic bombers, a Tu-160 Blackjack and a Tu-22M Backfire, were comprehensively dismantled using industrial equipment provided by the Raytheon Technical Services Company.

It was not just Ukraine’s long-range strike capability that was being systematically eliminated. Over the next decade, NATO also assisted Ukraine in a program described as “strengthening demilitarizing capacity,” which entailed the destruction of 1,000 man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS), some 15,000 tons of conventional ammunition (artillery shells, cluster munitions, mortar rounds, and small arms ammunition), and 400,000 small arms and light weapons. During a 2005 visit to the Donetsk State Factory of Chemical Products, then-Senator Barack Obama posed grinning for a photo-op in front of a vast pile of dismantled shells, later announcing that “we can start using our resources to dismantle these arms and create a more peaceful and safe future for the people of Ukraine and for people all around the world.” Ukraine’s “demilitarizing capacity” continued to be “strengthened” in the years to come, as tens of thousands of tons of conventional ammunition and millions of antipersonnel mines were processed by the small arms destruction facility in western Ukraine and the explosive waste incinerator in Donetsk. There would be no need for these instruments of death going forward. After all, Ukraine had taken the peaceful path of stability, and had been granted explicit security guarantees — my apologies, security assurances — by the great powers. Europe was gearing up for a post-Cold War “century of peace or more.” It was time to leave the conflicts of the past behind, let the dead at long last bury their dead, and concentrate on the future.

III

With all the benefits that hindsight brings, we know that President Leonid Kravchuk’s last-second reservations about the surrender of Ukraine’s nuclear weapons and long-range strike assets were prescient. Nuclear weapons, or at the very least nuclear umbrellas, represent the ultimate guarantors of a nation’s sovereignty and security and are far more effective than any memoranda. Pariah regimes like North Korea and Iran have come to recognize this, as did Muammar Gaddafi, we can assume, upon being captured by the Misrata militia, sodomized with a bayonet, and unceremoniously executed, a fate that he likely would have avoided had he accelerated, rather than eliminated, the Libyan weapons of mass destruction program in 2003.

At the time, however, few would have blamed Kyiv for fulfilling the terms of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, or for pursuing a broader policy of demilitarization. The Cold War was over and it was time to reap the peace dividend. Strategic bombers designed to strike NATO targets, and nuclear missiles once aimed at western cities, were entirely surplus to requirements and expensive to maintain. Conventional weapons stockpiles were also dangerous, as was made abundantly and tragically clear by a 2004 depot explosion in Melitopol that killed five people and damaged 1,500 buildings. Sheltered under the aegis of the Budapest Memorandum, Ukrainians could choose butter instead of guns, and focus their efforts on purely domestic considerations, as they emerged bleary-eyed from the darkness of the Soviet era into the blinding light of political pluralism and market economics.

The last of the Cold War problems had supposedly been put to rest, and there was even talk of an “end of geopolitics” and an “end of history,” a welcome development in a country that had struggled for so long under the weight of geopolitics and history. Ukraine, known variously as the “breadbasket of Europe” and the “gates of Europe,” straddles what the Poles used to call the dzikie pola, the “wild plain” situated between the forests of Central Europe and the vast Eurasian steppes. Its abundant mineral wealth and fecund black earth — Ukraine ranks fourth globally in terms of the assessed value of its natural resources — provide blessings as well as the infamous “resource curse,” and its position between East and West has made it a transit country par excellence. Edmund Burke notoriously proclaimed that “with respect to us, Poland might be, in fact, considered as a country on the moon,” and Neville Chamberlain even more notoriously described Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia as “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.” All too many in the West seem to feel the same way about Ukraine, oblivious to the economic and strategic importance of the country, and the untold value of its human capital.

In the 20th century, Ukraine became the chief battleground between the Nazis and the Soviets. As a result, Ukrainians suffered more deaths from state-sponsored violence than any other European country during this period. Lenin understood that the Soviet experiment was dependent on a steady stream of Ukrainian wheat and coal, while Stalin conceived of Ukraine as “a real fortress of the USSR.” Timothy Snyder, in his magisterial Bloodlands (2010), described how “purged, starved, collectivized, and terrorized, [Ukraine] fed and defended Soviet Russia and the rest of the Soviet Union,” and how Hitler “dreamed of the endlessly fertile Ukrainian soil, assuming that Germans would extract more from the terrain than the Soviets.” A German military study, released in 1940, determined that Ukraine was “agriculturally and industrially the most valuable part of the Soviet Union,” and Hitler was informed by his civilian planners that “the occupation of Ukraine would liberate us from every economic worry.” Stalin felt likewise, and Ukraine, caught in this geopolitical vice, paid an unfathomable price. Mass graves from Stalin’s purges and Hitler’s massacres are still being unearthed to this day.

The end of geopolitics and an era of democratic peace would thus bode extremely well for Ukraine. So too would the end of history. Ukraine’s past, so deep and so remarkable, is a source of justified pride for its people, and as Serhii Plokhy has noted,

Historians look to those [medieval] principality-based identities for the origins of the modern East Slavic nations. The Vladimir-Suzdal principality served as forerunner of early modern Muscovy and, eventually, of modern Russia. Belarusian historians look to the Polatsk principality for their roots. And Ukrainian historians study the principality of Galicia-Volhynia to uncover the foundations of Ukrainian nation-building projects. But all those identities ultimately lead back to Kyiv, which gives Ukrainians a singular advantage: they can search for their origins without ever leaving their capital.

All roads lead to Kyiv, but those roads invariably bring Russian invaders, filling the historical record not just with triumphs but with painful tragedies: political domination and cultural genocide, Bolshevik revolution and civil war, Soviet collectivization and de-kulakization campaigns, the Holodomor, Stalinist purges, the Executed Renaissance of Ukrainian intellectuals, killing fields and torture chambers, world wars, genocide, millions upon millions of dead, and tens of millions more brutalized.

It was this history that Ukrainians hoped had ended with the fall of the Soviet Union. Systematic demilitarization was accompanied by an increasingly westward orientation, evident in the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, as Ukrainians took the advice of the poet, political activist, and victim of the Executed Renaissance Mykola Khvylovy: “Get away from Moscow!” In 1976, the Ukrainian Helsinki Group announced that “We Ukrainians live in Europe,” but attempts to integrate politically with Europe eventually led to an armed confrontation with Russia, first in 2014, and then in 2022, when the purple testament of bleeding war was opened, accompanied, as ever, by swarms of Russian invaders, and by the age-old phenomena of mass graves, pulverized cities, and columns of refugees.

Now we see muddy trench warfare reminiscent of the First World War, and aerial bombing campaigns reminiscent of the Second World War. So-called Storm-Z battalions of Russian convict soldiers are thrown into “meat assaults,” in a hellish reprise of the conflicts of the 20th century. The ruined, lunar cityscapes of eastern Ukraine reflect the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and fire-bombed Tokyo and Dresden. Temporarily occupied cities have become epicenters of partisan resistance, while Russians operate torture chambers and fill mass graves throughout the country, as in the days of the Cheka, the NKVD, and the Waffen-SS. Libraries and monasteries burn, museums are looted, and graves are robbed. Ukrainian religious groups are once again ruthlessly persecuted, as in Melitopol, where Russian soldiers have desecrated Protestant churches and tortured pastors and youth leaders like Mark Sergeev, leaving no Protestant or Evangelical churches standing in a place where they once outnumbered Orthodox congregations. The pro-Russian Donetsk militant leader Pavel Gubarev casually admits that “we can’t commit genocide against them all,” so “we will have to re-educate them, create concentration camps, but for this we must win at any cost.” All the savagery of the past is being visited upon the present, plain for all to see. Escape has become a necessity.

IV

It is Ukraine’s particular misfortune to share a 2,295-kilometer-long border with Russia, where the weight of the past falls just as heavily, and far more oppressively, as was very much in evidence during Tucker Carlson’s recent, much-discussed, but ultimately pointless interview with Vladimir Putin. During the Russian dictator’s interminable neurodivergent history of the Slavic Peoples, viewers were treated to a tedious disquisition on everything from the legendary Varangian chieftain Rurik to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, when “the Poles overplayed and forced Hitler to start World War Two by invading them,” a spurious history lesson that carefully avoided any mention of Ukraine’s distinct history, language, and culture in a cynical attempt to deny the indisputable fact of Ukrainian identity. It was an effort that could only have convinced the most gullible or ideologically poisoned spectators, of which there are, unfortunately, quite a few in our benighted and morally ignorant age. (READ MORE: Utterly Conventional: Thoughts on the Tucker–Putin Interview)

This Muscovite obsession with history has become genuinely pathological. Normally-constituted people acknowledge the past, revere the past, or engage in what the Germans call Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or coping with the past, but they still live in the present and for the future. In the ruins of post-war Germany, Hans Habe rightly observed that “birth and death, pregnancy and sickness, poverty and toil, a room, warmth, copulation — even in the most glorious hours of mankind these remain the symbols of a life that goes on, of hope springing anew.” In Putin’s necrophiliac empire, it is death that reigns supreme. Recall Putin’s remarks on Feb. 7, 2022, directed at the Ukrainian people: “Whether you like it or don’t like it, bear with it, my beauty,” a sinister reference to a song by the Soviet-era punk rock group Red Mold, which features the altogether charming line “Sleeping beauty in a coffin, I crept up and f——- her. Like it, or dislike it, sleep my beauty.” This horrible sickness in the body politic is only partially masked by mottos like “For Love and the Fatherland,” or Russia’s trademark preoccupation with ersatz traditionalism and Orthodoxy, despite it having, oh, let’s see, the highest abortion rates in Europe, a globally-leading divorce rate of 73 percent, a culture of brutal physical and sexual abuse (dedovshchina) in the military, and a church attendance rate this last Christmas of roughly 1 percent. But Russia has metro stations and grocery stores, so naturally, Tucker Carlson and his ilk have become positively enamored with Putin’s kleptocratic banana republic.

Consider, if you have the stomach for it, the events of the night of Feb. 10, 2024, when an Iranian-manufactured Shahed drone, one of 31 launched by Russians against targets in eastern and southern Ukraine, struck a fuel depot in the city of Kharkiv, igniting a fire that consumed 3,700 square meters of the residential neighborhood located along Kotelnaya Street in the central Nemyshlyan neighborhood. First responders were able to save 25 houses from destruction, but 15 buildings were lost before the blaze was brought under control. In one of the destroyed homes, rescuers made a harrowing discovery: five members of a family that had perished in its entirety. Grigory Putyatin, husband and father, was found in an interior hallway. It appears that when he lost consciousness, his son, the four-year-old Mikhaylo, left his father’s side and crawled into the kitchen, where he died alone. When firefighters entered the bathroom, they found the remains of Olga Putyatina, Grigory’s wife and a local prosecutor, preserved in a final embrace with the charred bodies of her seven-year-old son Oleksiy and her ten-month-old son Pavlo.

I would very much like to know what the legend of Rurik the Varangian chieftain has to do with the deaths of Olga Putyatina and the children she held on to until her last desperate breath. I would like to know what Yaroslav the Wise’s order of succession has to do with the death of Grigory Putyatin, who tried to comfort his son as their lungs filled with smoke, or with the death of Mikhaylo Putyatin, who spent his last moments alone in the inferno that was once his home. Does Russia’s bestial behavior, so brazenly on display that night in Kharkiv, really call out for a long-winded historical explanation, or does it simply require, as the Russian dissident Alexander Nevzorov characterizes it, “a purely zoological explanation”? If history, in the so-called Russian World, constitutes not a source of pride and inspiration but of ressentiment, revanchism, irredentism, and murderous impulses, then surely Ukrainians are right to head in the diametrically opposite direction, westward, away from Moscow, and towards a democratic and freedom-loving future, and the sheer bravery of their struggle should be recognized and rewarded.

V

Last autumn, at a charity concert organized by our local Ukrainian cultural committee, I heard a particularly stirring rendition of the famous song Oy u luzi chervona kalyna, or “A Red Viburnum in the Meadow,” performed by a Ukrainian opera ensemble. First composed in 1875 by the archaeologist Volodymyr Antonovych and the ethnologist Mykhailo Drahomanov, and then given a more modern treatment by the composer Stepan Charnetskyi in 1914, Oy u luzi was adopted by the Sich Riflemen of the First World War, by members of the Ukrainian People’s Army in 1918, and by patriotic Ukrainians ever since. As the glorious lines resounded in the church hall where the performance was held, I was struck, as I always am, by the rousing song’s third verse, which tells of how:

Марширують наші добровольці у кривавий тан,
Визволяти братів-українців з московських кайдан.
А ми наших братів-українців визволимо,
А ми нашу славну Україну, гей-гей, розвеселимо!

Marshyruiut nashi dobrovoltsi u kryvavyi tan,
Vyzvoliaty brativ-ukraintsiv z Moskovskykh kaidan.
A my nashykh brativ-ukraintsiv vyzvolymo,
A my nashu slavnu Ukrainu, hei-hei, rozveselymo!

Our volunteers are marching in a bloody dance,
To free our brother Ukrainians from the Muscovite shackles.
We will free our brother-Ukrainians,
And hey! Hey! We will bring joy to our glorious Ukraine!

On Jan. 14, 1994, Presidents Boris Yeltsin, Bill Clinton, and Leonid Kravchuk were certain that they had put an end to the Cold War, made the world permanently safer, chosen the path of stability, and paved the way for a century or more of peace in Europe. Yet still, the same bloody dance goes on.

Ukrainians have learned from experience how difficult it is to escape the shackles of the past. The task is not, however, impossible. I am reminded of the words of the Albanian Hoxha-era dissident Fatos Lubonja, who once told the Polish journalist Margo Rejmer of the relationship between destiny and determination:

What is destiny? The river of events that flows through our lives? Imagine this: life is a river formed of two streams that join together. The first is fate: everything that happens because of God’s will — major forces that are stronger than us. We’re defenseless against them … But there’s also the second stream, which I’ll call determination: all the events on which we have an influence, that we shape by means of our own will. What we want to do, who we want to be. Anyone would want these two streams to form a single current, for blind fate to match our inclinations and desires. I was born in wretched Albania — my God, why not in France? You were born in Poland, why not in Germany? That’s our fate — we can’t escape it, but we can put up resistance. We can refuse to let it rule our lives.

The Ukrainian people were fated to contend with the forces of geopolitics and history, but they have shown themselves eminently capable, over the centuries and particularly over the last two years, of resisting and showing a determination against seemingly impossible odds, which outside observers first underestimated and now seem to take for granted.

Since that terrible day of Feb. 24, 2022, the Ukrainian military has performed admirably, parrying Russian thrusts towards Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, and Kharkiv, reclaiming the territory around Izium and Kherson, disabling a third of the once-vaunted Black Sea Fleet, and restoring the Ukrainian sea corridor so that maritime exports have returned to pre-war levels. But Ukraine’s nemesis still represents the world’s second-largest military, replete with a massive stockpile of Soviet-era armaments that is replenished by a steady stream of drones, artillery shells, and ballistic missiles from Iran and North Korea. The legacy of the American-imposed process of “strengthening demilitarizing capacity” haunts Ukraine, which has desperately sought to ramp up its defense industry to make up for lost time, while accepting aid from international partners who furnish what they can.

Efforts on Ukraine’s behalf have not been negligible, as can be seen from commitments made just in recent days and weeks. A coalition of allies led by Latvia is aiming to provide Ukraine with one million drones by Feb. 24 of next year. Denmark has pledged to provide all its available artillery, the Czech Republic has scrounged together some 800,000 155mm and 120mm artillery rounds, Finland has approved its 22nd military aid package, Germany’s last aid package includes self-propelled tracked and wheeled howitzers, 120,000 rounds of artillery, Skynex air defense systems, and missiles for IRIS-T SLS air defense systems. France has signed a 10-year security pact with Ukraine, pledging €3 billion of assistance for 2024 and vowing to increase cooperation on artillery-related matters, not long after the United Kingdom signed a similarly “unprecedented security agreement” with the government in Kyiv. Still, the nations of Europe, which strengthened their demilitarizing capacity in the aftermath of the Cold War in reliance on American security guarantees, cannot support Ukrainian efforts on their own, and the effects of congressional dithering and entirely underserved vacations are being felt on the Ukrainian frontlines, where the heroic but ammunition-starved defenders of Avdiivka were deprived of fire support and counter-battery fire. America risks abdicating its status as the sole guarantor of international peace and stability. Ukraine faces a far greater peril even than that.

I have precious little time for the reflexively Putin-apologetical “realist” international relations scholar John “Putin rarely lies to foreign audiences” Mearsheimer, but there is a modicum of truth to his 2015 prediction that “the West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path.” Now, it is profoundly offensive to blame the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine on the United States or NATO, as Mearsheimer invariably does, instead of on the obviously Putin regime. Putin himself typically forgets to attribute the war to the potential of NATO expansion, preferring (as he did in the recent Carlson interview) to ramble about the “gathering of the Russian lands” and other such tripe. And bear in mind that in May 2002 Putin even admitted that “Ukraine will not shy away from the processes of expanding interaction with NATO and the Western allies as a whole. Ukraine has its own relations with NATO…At the end of the day, the decision is to be taken by NATO and Ukraine. It is a matter for those two partners.”

If Ukraine can be said to have journeyed down the “primrose path,” it was a trip that began in Catherine Hall on Jan. 14, 1994, when it took the “stable path” of disarmament following the Trilateral Statement. Ukraine’s “demilitarizing capacity” was systematically “strengthened” by its newfound allies, who assured its security, but in doing so rendered it vulnerable to its rapacious neighbor. Amidst the ongoing invasion, Ukraine’s defense industry conglomerate Ukroboronprom has valiantly strived to make up for lost time, and allies have provided desperately needed aid, but five months of congressional inaction have taken a toll, the cost of which Ukrainians bear in the currency of blood and land. The immortal words of the Ukrainian poet, ethnographer, and activist Ivan Franko, from his 1897 poem “If,” often come to my mind these days:

Якби могучість, щастя і свобода
Відмірялись по мірі крові й сліз,
Пролитих з серця і з очей народа, –
То хто б з тобою супірництво зніс?

Yakby mohuchist, shchastia i svoboda
Vidmirialys po miri krovi i sliz,
Prolytykh z sertsia i z ochei naroda, –
To khto b z toboiu supirnytstvo znis?

If power, joy, and liberty
Were measured by the blood and tears
Shed by the people’s hearts and eyes
Who could ever rival you?

The flow of blood and tears continues, amidst a sanguinary centuries-old dance that has been in full swing for two full years. Three decades ago, Ukrainians nobly chose the path of stability and European integration, and are paying the price for their aspirations, while demonstrating an awe-inspiring determination in the face of a barbarous onslaught. If our own internal strife and limited attention span endanger Ukraine’s achievements, it will not only be to our eternal discredit. The world will consequently be far less safe and secure if all the wrong lessons about non-proliferation are learned, if the value of American security assurances is rendered worthless, and if a nation’s immense sacrifices in the cause of freedom are treated with casual indifference.