Ukraine's acute fear of Russia has made it hesitant to give up its nuclear arms, and that fear was exacerbated last month by the electoral victory in Russia of ultranationalists who have vowed to reabsorb Ukraine and other territories. The struggling republic's massive debt to Russia for energy imports will be forgiven and it will receive nuclear fuel, economic and technical aid from the United States, and security guarantees that Ukraine was said to regard as critical. In exchange for giving up its nuclear arms, Ukraine is to get significant benefits. Kazakhstan last month ratified the Lisbon Protocols and signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That would fulfill a timetable set in the 1992 Lisbon Protocols in which the two other nuclear ex-Soviet republics - Kazakhstan and Belarus - agreed to eliminate the weapons on their territories. The agreement sets what an official called "a sequence" that will result in the deactivation and destruction of the remaining weapons and produce a nuclear-free Ukraine within seven years. The officials said the agreement calls for Ukraine to begin dismantling its most dangerous weapons first: SS-24 and SS-19 missiles that contain a total of 1,240 nuclear warheads. The administration left vague questions of timing and of the authority under which Kravchuk could commit to an agreement without ratification by the Ukrainian parliament, which has voted to limit arms agreements in ways that the Russians and Americans in turn have deemed unacceptable.Īccording to officials here from the White House and State Department, negotiations continued, via phone calls and written messages, almost to the moment of the announcement. involvement and approval" will be followed Friday with the three-way signing in Moscow. This appearance, called "an official stamp of U.S. As part of the agreement, Clinton will travel to Kiev on Wednesday to appear at the airport there with Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk to hail the pact and show support for the Ukrainian leader. The Ukraine agreement is complex, and some of it is to remain secret or deliberately vague under the terms of the negotiations that produced it. He called today's accord a "giant step" for world peace and stability. As Clinton said today, "I have sought to ensure that the breakup of the Soviet Union does not result in the birth of new nuclear states which could raise the chances for nuclear accident, nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation." The agreement would leave Russia the only nuclear state among the republics. The elimination of nuclear weapons in Ukraine has been one of the most important policy goals of the past and current administrations in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse. Some details of the agreement are to remain secret. The agreement, to be signed by the three leaders in Moscow on Friday, puts in place a process under which 1,800 warheads left in Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union would be dismantled and the highly enriched uranium within them processed into nuclear fuel for civilian use. 10 - President Clinton announced today that the United States, Russia and Ukraine will sign an agreement aimed at eliminating Ukraine's nuclear arms in exchange for a broad range of political and economic benefits.
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