In this book Yuri Kostenko describes the complicated pathways of Ukraine's denuclearization as the country was emerging from the crumbling Soviet Union in the beginning of the 1990s. The book is mainly based on the author's own insights in the process, which he was part of in his capacity as a member of parliament, as well as a member of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine and Minister of Environmental Protection. Ukraine's Nuclear Disarmament is not just a history, but an attempt to reassess the utility of nuclear weapons to stabilize regional politics. Kostenko explores the argument that had Ukraine managed to keep nuclear weapons, the country would not have to face subsequent Russian claims on its politics and territory, particularly in relation to Maidan, the occupation of Crimea, and the war in Donbas. The book is referenced to primary sources, many of which are kept in the author's own personal archive. Kostenko, however, is not a professional historian but a politician, and this book is part memoir, part presentation of political arguments focused on rethinking Ukraine's position in what is a highly unstable international environment, especially since the country has been at war with Russia (this review was completed before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022).

The main question for him is why Ukraine did not seriously consider retaining nuclear weapons. Many reasons are named: absence of own geopolitical and foreign security planning, because the key institutes and agencies were located in Moscow (51), US pressure, and the legal quagmire. Although 17% of the Soviet nuclear arsenal and a major missile production company were situated in Ukraine, the Ukrainian government did not have any technical details about the weapons until 1992. Similarly, although many Ukrainian scientists worked in the Soviet military-industrial complex, the newly sovereign Ukraine did not have an expert group able to assess the country's nuclear inheritance and shape its strategic future.

In six chapters, Kostenko details the transformation of the Soviet nuclear complex in Ukraine. He addresses how the US government pushed Ukraine into giving up nuclear weapons in relation to a nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT). In his recent book, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (Yale, 2021), Vladislav Zubok argues that Ukrainians did not understand that Soviet nuclear weapons were a liability, given the risk of accident and complex needs of maintenance and modernization. However, Kostenko shows clearly that some Ukrainian actors understood this quite well and, moreover, realized that dismantling nuclear warheads in Ukraine would secure the flow of western aid for Ukrainian scientists and not Russian ones. In May 1992, all tactical nuclear weapons were moved to Russia without permission from the Ukrainian parliament (72). Kostenko refers to those nuclear weapons as “ours,” arguing that the nuclear warheads were Ukrainian property that was stolen by Russia. This was taking place in the context of negotiations of Ukraine joining the START 1 agreement and NPT as a non-nuclear state, which caused immense difficulties because this non-nuclear status entailed the Russian Federation owning what otherwise counted as Ukraine's property, the remaining nuclear arsenal, as well as warheads and delivery systems. The subsequent chapters thus map the nuclear arsenal that was stationed in Ukraine, consider the economic implications of reusing nuclear warheads for fuel to power nuclear plants (where nuclear weapons are considered valuable economical assets and not detrimental or a technical and social problem), and show how the international negotiations about NPT were entangled with the emerging national security policy of Ukraine. To the disappointment of Kostenko and others, between 1994 and 1996 all nuclear warheads were removed to Russia.

For Kostenko, the lack of interest in the nuclear arsenal of the first Ukrainian republic was a sign of weak sovereignty and the beginning of a path to dependency, where Ukraine's politics and national security strategy remained enmeshed with Russia's interests. Furthermore, Kostenko claims that Ukraine's loss of nuclear weapons was everybody's loss, resulting in a destabilized geopolitical situation in eastern Europe. In this respect, Kostenko's study belongs to the emerging scholarship examining the NPT as a colonial attempt to concentrate military power among select global North countries, as exemplified by Jacob Hamblin in his The Wretched Atom: America's Global Gamble with Peaceful Nuclear Technology (2021).

Ukraine's Nuclear Disarmament reads well. It is an interesting and timely document that will be of great interest not only to Ukraine scholars but also to the scholars of national security and global nuclear politics.