On the evening of November 22, 1994, I sat in the White House State Dining Room as President Clinton hosted Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma at a state dinner. Sandy Berger, then Clinton’s deputy national security adviser and soon to be national security adviser, changed seats to sit beside me. Over the next three hours, Sandy laid out what would become one of the most consequential — and catastrophic — foreign policy decisions of the post–Cold War era: Within 13 days, Ukraine would sign the Budapest Memorandums, surrendering the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal to the Russian Federation.
I told Sandy that night, as plainly as I could, that this action was a path to war. Thirty years later, hundreds of thousands are dead, and the path I warned of has been walked to its bitter end.
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