Join Christopher Nolan at Conversations Before Midnight

security guarantees

US President Bill Clinton, Russian President Boris, Yeltsin, and Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk sign the Trilateral Agreement on transferring nuclear weapons from Ukraine to Russia and associated matters in Moscow, January 1994. Photo credit: Joseph P. Harahan, historian of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and the Clinton Presidential Library.

Why security assurances are losing their clout as a nuclear nonproliferation instrument

By Ariel E. Levite | Nuclear Weapons

US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and Russian deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov pose for pictures as they attend security talks on soaring tensions over Ukraine at the US permanent Mission, in Geneva, on January 10. "The conversation was difficult, it couldn't have been easy," Ryabkov was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency after meeting Sherman during a working dinner in Geneva. (Photo by DENIS BALIBOUSE/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

Putin’s demand for security guarantees: Not new and not to be taken literally, but not to be ignored

By Andrey A. Baklitskiy | Analysis, Nuclear Risk