Fiona Hill

And in the early 1990s, when Ukraine became an independent state, it inherited that nuclear arsenal from the Soviet Union.

Basically, whatever was stationed or positioned in Ukrainian territory at the time became Ukraine's.

strategic and you know kind of basically intermediate and tactical nuclear weapons and you know in the united states at the time you know we had all this panic about what was going to happen with all of that i mean i think you know as a scientist and you know kind of technically it would have been difficult for ukraine to actually use this i mean the targeting was you know done centrally they were actually stationed there but nonetheless ukraine like belarus and kazakhstan suddenly became nuclear powers

And, you know, Ash Carter, the former U.S.

defense secretary who's just died tragically and Dave was talking about, you know, talking together today, was part of a whole team of Americans and others who, you know, tried to work with Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan to get them to give up the nuclear weapons.

And back in the early period of that, 93, 94, you go back, and I mean, I was writing about this at the time.

I wrote a report called Back in the USSR, which is kind of on the website of the Kennedy School with some other colleagues.

And we were monitoring how there was all these accusations coming out of Moscow, the defense ministry and the Duma, the parliament and others, that Ukraine was trying to find a way of making a dirty bomb using its nuclear weapons, you know, becoming a menace.

And, you know, kind of Ukraine might have to be brought to order.

So a lot of the dynamics we're seeing now were happening then, irrespective of NATO.

Basically, the problem was always Ukraine getting away.

Yeltsin himself, when he unraveled the Soviet Union, didn't really want it to unravel, but he didn't have the wherewithal to bring the countries back again.

Russia was weak.

after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Its economy imploded.

It had to give sovereignty to all of these constituent parts of the Russian Federation in terms of a sort of devolution of authority.

It had the war in Chechnya, which Yeltsin stupidly sparked off in 1994.

You had Tatarstan, one of the regions, the all-rich regions, basically resting out a kind of a bilateral treaty with Moscow.

The whole place seemed like it was falling apart so that you couldn't do anything on Ukraine.

Because you didn't have the wherewithal to do it.