Recent events in Ukraine may not appear to bear any relation to the security situation in Northeast Asia. However, while Ukraine’s historical background is by no means the same as that of the Korean Peninsula, modern Ukraine is a living textbook of realist international politics, and as such offers meaningful insights. North Korea will be keeping a close watch on developments in Eastern Europe, for Ukraine’s choices, situated as it is between Russia and the West, provide lessons to Pyongyang. It is important for us to take note of the facts.

Ukraine has a long and problematic relationship with Russia. In the latter half of the 19^th century, one of Catherine the Great’s goals in her westward expansion of the Russian Empire was access to ice-free port facilities such as those on offer in Crimea. One underlying objective of Russia’s 1853 Crimean War against the Ottoman Empire and its allies England and France was control of the same. Though Moscow lost that war, it launched the Russo-Turkish War a decade later with many of the same goals in mind. England and the other powers only just managed to frustrate Russian expansionism in the Mediterranean once more.

In the interval between these two conflagrations, pan-Slav nationalism gained in political strength. Its adherents promoted Russia’s unique culture and political system, and opposed Westernist reforms. They believed that Russia had a specific system, customs, and religion; they were in favour of Russian political conservatism, its authoritarianism and ethnocentric nature. Russia exploited this pan-Slav sentiment as it sought to reach the Mediterranean Sea, something against which England, France, and Austria were on constant watch. Unsurprisingly, the Balkan region upon which this great game played out eventually came to be known as the “powder keg of Europe.”

In the end, the 1917 Russian Revolution saw the Crimean Peninsula incorporated into the USSR. The area, still the only Ukrainian region where the majority of the population is Russian, faces the Balkans to the west, while to the east stands Russia. To the north is Ukraine proper. This geography is what makes Ukraine the most important country on Russia’s western flank. Nikita Khrushchev returned the Crimean Peninsula to Ukraine in the 1950s, which was of course partly attributable to his Ukrainian ethnicity. Conversely, President Vladimir Putin is not likely to permit Western Europe to hold sway over such a strategically vital region.

North Korea surely has a particular interest in Ukraine’s former nuclear capacity. Lest we should forget, the state of Ukraine was in possession of the third highest number of nuclear weapons in the world until little more than two decades ago, a fact that further corroborates the importance of Ukraine to Russia. However, when the USSR was dissolved in 1991, Ukraine fell under the auspices of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and, in 1994, Kiev agreed to return all the nuclear weapons on its territory to Russia in exchange for a promise of territorial security (the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances) in a deal with the UN Security Council. 

This agreement is cited as a successful example of international management of nuclear non-proliferation, and represents the first application of a “Negative Security Assurance.” Prior to the post-Soviet era, “Positive Security Assurances” had been the standard. This state of affairs originated from a 1968 Security Council resolution that guaranteed UN military intervention if a nuclear state attacked a non-nuclear state with nuclear weapons. This was widely disputed, however, and individual countries continued to call for case-by-case security guarantees. Therefore, in 1978 the UN Disarmament and International Security Committee offered a guarantee that non-nuclear states would never be attacked with nuclear weapons. However, non-nuclear states complained that this was simply a declaration, and therefore lacked binding strength. The first time that the guarantee was given greater enforceable weight was during the disarming of Ukraine.

Despite the uncertainty surrounding the guarantee, why did Ukraine go down the path of simply giving up its inherited nuclear capacity? One core factor was the painful memory of the disaster at Chernobyl. Hundreds of thousands of people had been directly affected by the explosion, which took place on Ukrainian soil in 1986, and 25,000+ died. The nuclear fallout from the stricken reactor polluted approximately 8% of Ukrainian land, not to mention vast tracts of neighboring Belarus and elsewhere.

Thus, by 1996, Ukraine had been recognized as a non-nuclear state, and received $460 million in economic assistance for its trouble. However, that amount is dwarved by Ukraine’s existing liabilities.

This last point raises the issue of Ukraine’s geostrategic value to surrounding powers. In November of 2013, President Putin offered Kiev $15 billion in aid in response to Ukraine’s ongoing negotiations with the EU. Pro-Russian President Yanukovich immediately accepted the offer and stopped negotiations with the EU, and thereafter Ukraine dissolved into a battleground between pro- and anti-Russian factions. In response to the Russian offer, the EU put forward an aid plan worth 11 billion Euros, and the US also promised $1 billion. For its part, cash-rich China has invested or otherwise lent Ukraine more than $8 billion dollars over the last four months alone. This is all economic testament to Ukraine’s strategic location between Europe and Asia.

In sum, Ukraine has received a great deal more in aid and assistance during the recent geostrategic conflict than it did for its act of nuclear disarmament, because geostrategic complexity forces competing powers to vie for Ukraine’s favor. On this point alone, North Korea is sure to conclude that nuclear disarmament is not the route to the kind of economic rewards that it seeks. Rather, the prudent path from their viewpoint might be to keep on creating conflicted relations between regional powers, so that those powers are forced to pay up for Pyongyang’s good will.

However, Ukraine possesses a militarily strategic location and acts as a transit route for Russian natural gas exports. North Korea has no such luck. Although Pyongyang possesses natural resources that could in principle be exploited as a financial lever, the political risk of doing so make it a tricky path. The Chinese-style special economic zone development route has also failed. Therefore, won’t North Korea ultimately conclude that harsh internal repression whilst increasing the value of its nuclear weapons is the best path to take?

Pyongyang fears that a sudden political collapse would occur if it were to emerge from its isolationism. They might well believe that it is now too late to decouple the economy from politics in any case, as China did in pursuing capitalism along with a one-party system from the late 1970s. Either way, North Korea’s obsession with nuclear weapons will not soon go away.

* This is an abridged translation of a Guest Column that appeared on Daily NK on March 7th. It has been amended to reflect the changing situation in Ukraine. Opinions expressed in Guest Columns do not necessarily reflect those of Daily NK.