The First Months of U.S. Relations with the New Russia, 1992

so many missed opportunities

US strong attachment to their nuke

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-...-30/first-months-us-relations-new-russia-1992

Washington D.C., January 30, 2023 – The George H.W. Bush administration was reluctant to embrace the “relations of deep mutual trust and alliance” proposed by the newly independent Russian Federation and its leader, Boris Yeltsin, in early 1992, according to declassified U.S. documents published today by the National Security Archive.

The Bush administration’s cautious management of U.S.-Soviet relations at the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 had focused primarily on command and control of the remaining Soviet nuclear weapons that were scattered over 16 republics, plus encouragement of radical economic reforms in Russia, without much in the way of U.S. economic aid – just exhortations.

The documents show Yeltsin was eager for new and dramatic arms control arrangements that would exceed whatever former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had offered in his “arms race in reverse” in the late 1980s, and that Yeltsin sought American backing for Russia to take the Soviet Union’s place in a bipolar world. But the 1990s were the years of the American “unipolar moment” in geopolitics, and tragic years for Russia, where rule by decree replaced any parliamentary democracy, the economy collapsed twice into depression, and the legacy was a return to authoritarianism. Yeltsin describes his economic troubles candidly and warns his American counterparts that if there is no aid to the countries of the commonwealth, “there would be a reversal.”

The subject of relations with Ukraine comes up in almost all of the conversations. Yeltsin is committed to resolving disputes amicably and describes his relationship with President Leonid Kravchuk as “very good.” The Russian president understands the domestic pressures Kravchuk faces from nationalist groups in the parliament. While trying to be sensitive to the Ukrainian concerns, the Russian leaders believe that Ukraine is “our main destabilizing factor.” Yegor Gaidar believes that Russian-Ukrainian issues will take a long time to be fully resolved but assures Bush that there would be no “Yugoslav-type case in Russian-Ukrainian relations.” Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus agreed to send Soviet nuclear weapons back to Russia for dismantlement and signed the Lisbon protocol making them parties to the START I Treaty as non-nuclear states in May 1992.

Declassified as the result of Freedom of Information Act requests by the National Security Archive, these documents represent early highlights from a forthcoming reference collection covering the entire 1990s, US-Russian Relations from the End of the Soviet Union to the Rise of Vladimir Putin, to be published by ProQuest in the award-winning Digital National Security Archive series.

Today’s publication includes transcripts from the first two summit meetings between Yeltsin and Bush in 1992, highest-level messages from U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, insightful communiqués from the U.S. embassy in Moscow, and candid conversations with the lead reformer on Yeltsin’s economic team, Yegor Gaidar.

Among other revelations, the documents show Yeltsin offering to remove MIRV warheads (which allow a single missile to hit multiple targets) from all Russian ballistic missiles – a top priority for American arms controllers for two decades – only to face resistance from the U.S. Defense Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff because the resulting total numbers of U.S. warheads would be fewer than their excessive list of targets required. The American de-MIRVing proposal only extended to land-based missiles, the bulk of the Russian strategic arsenal, and not to submarine-based missiles where the U.S. had a large advantage.

In his memoir, Secretary of State James Baker memorably upbraids his colleagues Dick Cheney (the defense secretary) and Colin Powell (chairman of the Joint Chiefs), “They have offered us what we want, and what no one else has ever come close to: zero MIRVed ICBMs, and without eliminating MIRVed SLBMs. We can’t let this slip through our fingers because we think we need a higher total number. That is not sustainable with the public or with Congress.”[1]

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