Using Carrot and Stick, U.S. Presses Ukraine to Disarm

The United States has offered to cover the $100-million to $150-million cost of destroying Ukraine’s nuclear weapons, but only if the former Soviet republic first ratifies the START treaty, Sen. Sam Nunn said here Monday.

Nunn, the Georgia Democrat who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that he has met with Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk in Kiev and believes that Kravchuk will stick with his announced plan to turn Ukraine, which has seemed to drag its feet on disarmament, into a non-nuclear state.

Giving Kravchuk incentive--and political justification--for destroying Ukraine’s 176 intercontinental missiles, Nunn said the United States would compensate Kiev for the cost of dismantling the strategic arms and storage silos. The money would come from an $800-million fund earmarked for promoting disarmament.

“This is not foreign aid, it’s not humanitarian aid and it’s not economic assistance,” Richard G. Lugar, an Indiana Republican and member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said at a news conference Monday. “It’s clearly a security issue.”

In another bow to Kiev, Nunn announced that the Americans would not embark on a plan to buy highly enriched uranium, collected from dismantled nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union, until Russia agreed to share the proceeds with Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, the three other republics with nuclear weapons. The sum they might split might amount to as much as $5.5 billion over the next two decades.

But even as he was doling out carrots, Nunn also reminded Kravchuk that the United States carries a big stick--the power to manipulate Ukraine’s fragile economy by stimulating or discouraging private investment in the nation of 52 million.

“Relations between our two countries, the pattern of cooperation and investment by the private sector depends on Ukraine keeping its commitment” to the START and non-proliferation treaties, he warned.

“We made it clear that we strongly believe the United States has a commitment from Ukraine” to ratify the nuclear treaties, Nunn added.

“Our country and I think the entire world expects these commitments to be fulfilled.”

If Ukraine’s Parliament ratifies both pacts, Kazakhstan and Belarus may follow, suggested Nunn, who, with Lugar, is in the midst of a whirlwind tour of seven former Soviet republics; the tour ends today in Belarus. Russia has already approved the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks treaty and is expected to put its version of a START II agreement on the negotiating table later this week.