On Feb. 12, 2025, a reporter in the Oval Office asked President Donald Trump about Ukraine’s terms. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wanted security assurances, she said — then corrected herself: If the war ended, he wanted guarantees.
Two words. Two consecutive sentences. Used as if they meant the same thing.
The president said, “We’ll see what that means.”
THE ‘RUSSIAN PUPPET’ ARMING UKRAINE: WHY EUROPE KEEPS GETTING SERBIA WRONG
He was right to hedge. Nobody in Washington had answered that question in Ukraine’s favor for thirty years. The last time those two words ran together, Ukraine handed over the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal and got a piece of paper.
That record belongs to both parties. What is happening now is the first serious attempt to break it, and this administration is making it. To see why that matters, you have to see what the last thirty years looked like.
Two drafts, one file cabinet
In 2019, the National Security Archive declassified 91 records on Ukraine’s disarmament. Two tell you everything.
June 3, 1993: Ukraine’s foreign ministry drafts a treaty on the guarantees of its national security.
Circa July 1993: The State Department drafts a security assurance, now in the papers of Ambassador James Goodby, who ran the American side.
Dec. 5, 1994: Ukraine signs a memorandum on security assurances.
Treaty became memorandum. Guarantees became assurances. In English.
Here is the part almost nobody mentions. The memorandum has three equally authentic texts. The English says assurances. The Russian and Ukrainian say гарантии and гарантії — words that translate one way only: guarantees.
One document, two different promises, depending on which language you read it in. And Kyiv signed the one that said guarantees.
This was not a con. Steven Pifer, who worked on those negotiations, put it flatly years later: We said assurances, not guarantees, because guarantees would have meant committing American soldiers. Neither the George H.W. Bush nor the Bill Clinton administrations wanted a treaty that would go to the Senate. So they picked the instrument requiring no vote — and with no vote came no institution, no obligation, nothing anyone would have to dismantle to walk away.
‘On the margins’
Budapest gave the memorandum its name, the way a hotel gives its name to an accord. The real terms were settled in Moscow eleven months earlier. In November 1994, the White House announced the assurances would be signed “on the margins of the Budapest CSCE Summit.”
On the margins. Not my characterization — Washington’s own filing language, in advance, in writing. The end of Ukraine’s nuclear deterrent was an agenda item scheduled beside a summit about something else, because the presidents would be there anyway.
As for enforcement, read paragraph six: The signatories will consult if a situation arises raising a question about the commitments. Consult with whom, exactly? In March 2014, after Crimea, the Americans and British went to Paris. Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign affairs minister, declined to attend. In February 2022, Dmytro Kuleba, then in that role for Ukraine, invoked the paragraph. There was nothing to invoke it into — no venue, no calendar, nobody obliged to pick up the phone.
I know what those two words cost.
In April 2008, I was chief of military police in Shida Kartli. That is not an abstraction. The region runs from Khashuri and Kaspi through Gori and Kareli and up into the Prone gorge, Tighvi — the old Znauri district — and the Greater and Lesser Liakhvi valleys. One of my detachments was posted at Kurta, north of Tskhinvali. Kurta no longer exists. Neither does Avnevi. Neither does Nuli. That is the ground the Russian army came through in August 2008, and those places are not on the map.
I was not in the rooms described below. What happened there, I know from the men who were, and who have said so on the record.
My work fed the reporting on what Russia was doing across the line that spring. Nothing in it was ambiguous. Force levels rising. Equipment moving forward. The special services growing on the ground. Our services warned Washington and the European capitals, in writing, that refusing Georgia a Membership Action Plan would not reduce the risk of invasion. It would confirm it.
Moscow was not hiding it either. Grigol Vashadze, then deputy foreign minister, asked Vladimir Putin directly whether Russia would make Georgia pay for the West recognizing Kosovo. Putin’s answer: Yes, that is how it will be.
Washington did try. At Bucharest that April, then-President George W. Bush told our delegation he would fight like hell for it, and Britain and the Central and Eastern Europeans were with him. Germany did not move. What the alliance produced was a sentence: Georgia and Ukraine will become members of NATO. No date. No mechanism. No consequence if it never happened. An assurance, not a guarantee.
That decision has never been rescinded. NATO reaffirmed every element of it at Lisbon in 2010 and again at Brussels in 2018. Eighteen years on, the promise still stands, and nothing has ever followed from it — which is the whole problem in one sentence. Nobody has to break a promise that was never built to be kept.
In May, I was elected to parliament from Kareli. In August, the Russian army came. I fought at Gori as an ordinary rifleman, and after Gori fell, I raised a partisan detachment in Kareli.
Nobody lied to us. Bush meant every word. That is the part that should frighten people. Sincerity was the only thing holding that promise up — and sincerity is not a mechanism. You cannot convene it. You cannot leave it to your successor. You cannot invoke it at three in the morning when the columns cross the border.
The habit has a long life.
June 13, 2024: Then-President Joe Biden and Zelensky signed a ten-year bilateral security agreement. An executive agreement. It did not go to the Senate, carries no treaty status, and either party may walk away six months after written notice. Thirty years after Budapest, the same instrument, this time with the exit clause printed on the box.
December 2025: the Ukrainian outlet ZN.ua published its analysis of the American framework given to Kyiv after Steve Witkoff met Putin. The document is titled “Framework Security Assurances for Ukraine.” The word runs through it, title included. Not legally binding. Not subject to ratification by anybody’s parliament. Protections modeled on Article 5.
Article 5-like. Not Article 5. In 1994, that is exactly where it would have stopped.
This time, it did not stop.
Kyiv said the word out loud. In his New Year’s address on Dec. 31, 2025, Zelensky said intentions must become security guarantees and therefore be ratified by the U.S. Congress, by European parliaments, and by all partners. He said it again to American senators in Munich on Feb. 14, 2026. That same day, Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Ukraine had been given to understand the Trump administration was prepared for congressional ratification, and described what Kyiv wanted in words lifted from the 1993 file: legally binding guarantees rather than assurances.
That is ratification — the thing 1994 skipped, Bucharest never approached, and the 2024 agreement was written to avoid. This administration put it on the table, and the same administration is leaning on Europe to build what would stand behind it.
That leaning is not a separate story, whatever you read about burden-shifting. A guarantee is a standing obligation somebody carries — in forces, in planning, in money, in the long years when nothing happens. Somebody has to be there when it is invoked. That was missing in 1994, at Bucharest, and in 2024.
So when the text becomes public, skip the press release and ask three questions. Which word does it use, and is it in the title? Does it go to the Senate? What institution does it create — who convenes it, and who writes down what happened?
Article 5’s own language is famously elastic. What makes it the gold standard is not the sentence but three-quarters of a century of ratification votes, integrated command, and constant exercise built around it.
The words were never the thing. The machinery was.
Clinton handed Ukraine the words. Bush repeated them at Bucharest. Biden signed his own version with an exit clause. Whatever else you think of this president, Trump is the first to reach for the part that requires a vote — and the first to tell Europe out loud that a guarantee somebody else pays for is no guarantee at all.
WORLD WAR III HAS ARRIVED, AND WE’RE ALMOST OUT OF MISSILES
Finish it, and Kyiv holds the first promise it has ever been given that somebody would actually have to break. Leave it unfinished, and it joins the file.
A promise you cannot convene is not a promise. It is a sentence.
Emzari Gelashvili served in Georgia’s state security services from 1996 to 2006, in the Central Criminal Police Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 2006–2007, and as chief of military police in Shida Kartli in 2007–2008. He was a member of the Georgian parliament from 2008 to 2012.