The Price of Words: The Budapest Memorandum and the ‘Proxy War’ Narrative

Back in the comfortable warmth of London, politicians are still playing word games. Labour MP Diane Abbott recently took to Stop the War to warn against rearmament, claiming the conflict in Ukraine is basically just a failed NATO campaign against Russia. It must be nice viewing a war from 1,500 miles away – where you can dismiss a nation’s fight for survival as a Western proxy experiment and completely ignore the people actually getting bombed.

From the vantage point of a trench in the Donbas or the bombed-out shell of a school in Kharkiv, this kind of framing isn’t just frustrating; it’s an erasure of history. It ignores the agency of the people actually fighting, and more importantly, it ignores how we got here.

To understand the current conflict, you have to look back to December 1994, not just to the current machinations of Washington or Moscow.

The Promises of 1994

Thirty years ago, leaders from the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Ukraine gathered to sign the Budapest Memorandum. At the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine found itself holding the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

The agreement was supposed to be simple: Ukraine would surrender its nuclear weapons, transferring them to Russia for dismantlement, and in exchange, the US, UK, and Russia provided security assurances. They formally pledged to respect Ukraine’s independence, its sovereignty, and its existing borders, and they explicitly promised to refrain from the threat or use of force against the nation.

It wasn’t a mutual defense treaty like Article 5 of NATO. The semantic difference between “assurances” and “guarantees” was argued over by lawyers at the time, but the intent was clear to the Ukrainian people: Give up the ultimate deterrent, and your borders will be safe.

The Reality on the Ground

We know how those assurances played out. In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and backed separatists in the east. By 2022, the full-scale invasion began, completely shattering the commitments made in Budapest.

When politicians thousands of miles away dismiss Ukraine’s defense or argue against military aid by framing it as a “NATO” issue, they are telling a country that voluntarily disarmed itself for the sake of global peace that it has no right to defend itself when the very nation that took its weapons decides to invade.

This isn’t a proxy war. It’s a sovereign nation fighting for survival after a foundational security agreement was violated.

The ruins in Ukraine are vast, and the resilience is staggering. But that resilience isn’t fueled by NATO directives. It’s fueled by a people who understand that the promises of 1994 were broken, and that survival is now entirely in their own hands.

When the dust settles and the politicians move on to the next debate, the consequences of these broken promises remain. And I’ll be there, documenting what’s left.