Please join the Fletcher Eurasia Club for a lunch seminar with expert and author Mariana Budjeryn. She will discuss the international security implications of Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its relevance to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine today.

In 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine inherited the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal as well as parts of the Soviet military-industrial complex that delivered it. By the end of 1994, Ukraine decided to surrender its nuclear inheritance and join the international nonproliferation regime in exchange for financial compensation and security assurances from nuclear states, including the United States and Russia. Ukraine’s nuclear decisions gained new relevance after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and again in 2022. Drawing on multi-archival sources, Budjeryn’s recent book, Inheriting the Bomb: The Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine (2023), revisits the history and politics of Ukraine’s nuclear decision-making in the early 1990s, in the hopes of contributing to a better understating of the causes and consequences of Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament for international security and the global nuclear order. 

We encourage you to read Budjeryn’s articles on the global nuclear order and Russia’s war against Ukraine for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the post-Soviet nuclear predicament in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine for the Journal of Cold War Studies. The Eurasia Club weekly lunch seminar series engages with students, faculty, staff, and researchers to foster a better understanding of the region among members of the Fletcher community. Members of the wider Tufts community are also welcome to attend. Lunch will be served.

Mariana Budjeryn is a Senior Research Associate at the Project on Managing the Atom (MTA) at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School. She is the author of a new book, Inheriting the Bomb: The Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine (2023). She previously held appointments as a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at MTA and a visiting professor at Tufts University and Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. Mariana is a member of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academies of Sciences and a senior nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her research and analytical contributions appeared in the Journal of Cold War Studies, Nonproliferation Review, Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, War on the Rocks, and in the publications of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where she is a Global Fellow.