Presidential Interpretations of a Long-standing Political Choice

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to analyze one of the most acute long-standing problems of international cooperation in the context of Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic course aimed at ensuring its security after voluntarily renouncing its status as a nuclear state. The task is to study this problem through the prism of its interpretations by key actors at the highest levels of power, namely the Presidents of Ukraine, and to trace the evolution of their interpretations of the political decision regarding Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament, the role and consequences of which have remained an important and controversial issue in world politics for more than three decades.

The core meaning of the security assurances declared by the Budapest Memorandum (1994) remains relevant and unresolved to this day, although during this period six Presidents of Ukraine and one acting President have changed. None of them avoided this issue. Most of them repeatedly changed their views and provided contradictory assessments of the Memorandum, strongly criticizing the uncertainty of security guarantees and considering the renunciation of nuclear weapons a mistake, although all acknowledged that restoring Ukraine’s nuclear status is unrealistic. Attempts to amend the text of the Memorandum or to create a new legally binding international document did not receive the consent of the other signatory states.

It is proved that interpretations of the Budapest Memorandum have a nonlinear character and develop in a wave-like manner, passing through successive phases of reconsideration. Periodically reappearing in the information space, they become a cause for political discussions and political science research.

The study of the discursive paradigm of presidential interpretations regarding security guarantees shows that each subsequent return of this issue to the information and political environment sometimes has a significantly greater public resonance and political consequences than its initial actualization. Each subsequent stage shifted the emphasis of ideological renewal toward increasing radicalization, increasingly harsh assessments and, ultimately, toward a radical transformation and conversion of the symbol of a peacekeeping act of global significance into a strategic mistake of the Ukrainian authorities and the necessity of urgent accession to NATO or the deployment of their troops with nuclear weapons in Ukraine (according to the classical scheme of the dialectical transformation of a phenomenon into its opposite).

The research is based on a combination of qualitative analysis methods. The main method is diachronic discourse analysis, which makes it possible to identify changes in semantic emphases in the interpretation of the meaning and significance of the Budapest Memorandum. Within this approach, public speeches of political leaders, official documents, analytical materials, and media texts are analyzed.