"Since Sunday, Ukraine's new, built-in-chaos government has been chasing its ex-President Viktor Yanukovych around the country. He might be in Crimea; there was a helicopter and a convoy of cars, and, as the Times noted, "he was believed to have access to at least one yacht that might ferry him out of Ukraine." He hasn't been found yet; nor has the white Pomeranian dog in whose company he was last seen as he was leaving his very large home. This is the man who, when the weekend began, had been in charge of the country and its military. The catalogue of vehicles in which he may have fled brought to mind the closely watched trains that, twenty years ago, carried almost two thousand strategic nuclear warheads out of Ukraine, then a new country. They were being sent to Russia to be destroyed. The deal that made that exodus happen wasn't easy; it took American brokering and a lot of money, and the burned-out barricades in Kiev and the uncertainty about who's in charge makes one profoundly grateful for it. Better a loose President than loose warheads.
It's worth looking back at how all this came about, and why the situation in Ukraine, as scary as it is, could be a whole lot worse. When the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics fell apart, not all of its nuclear weapons were within what's now Russia. A lot of them were scattered in the republics that were spinning away. The Russian military (as it soon became) grabbed back the tactical, battlefield weapons, but the strategic missiles and their installations were trickier. And so Ukraine became the world's third-largest nuclear power. Kazakhstan became a nuclear power, too; so did small, broke Belarus, which somehow found itself with eighty-one intercontinental ballistic missiles. (Kazakhstan also got the Baikonur Cosmodrome, which is why the country now has a space industry.)
It was not obvious where all these missiles would end up, particularly not in the case of Ukraine, which was stronger than the others and more sharply at odds with Russia; it thought it might find better friends. (Steven Pifer, of the Brookings Institution, has a useful review.) The new Ukrainian government also thought that Russia was not negotiating in good faith (from a certain perspective, it had absconded with Ukraine's tactical warheads). Russia, meanwhile, suggested that the Ukrainians were not decent stewards of the weapons: they didn't know how to take care of them, and they would deteriorate and turn into public hazards—"much worse than Chernobyl," the Russian Foreign Minister said at the time. The disaster at Chernobyl had given the Ukrainians a look at a nuclear accident; it had also underscored a sense that Moscow was neglectful and mendacious. They also knew that I.C.B.M.s, even if they had no use for them, contained highly enriched uranium that was extremely valuable. And Ukraine needed money. In September, 1993, the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine fell apart
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