WASHINGTON, April 23. /TASS/. The US will raise the issue of Russia’s compliance with the Budapest memorandum at the Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) that will open next week at the UN headquarters in New York, US Under Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller has said.
Gottemoeller, who is in charge of arms control and international security, accused Russia on Wednesday of refusing to acknowledge the need for fulfilling the commitments as part of the 1994 Memorandum on Security Assurances.
Washington insists that under the memorandum signed in Budapest, Moscow pledged to respect Ukraine's territorial integrity and sovereignty in exchange for Kiev abandoning the nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union.
The US diplomat said the decisions of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine to give up their nuclear weapons after the collapse of the Soviet Union were "heroic."
In early March, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stressed that the signing of the memorandum only signaled that Russia, the US and the UK were committed "not to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine and not to threaten to use them."
"This was done in exchange for Ukraine’s voluntary abandonment of the nuclear arsenals of the former Soviet Union. Russia took no other commitments and neither did the other countries that signed the memorandum," Lavrov said.
The Budapest memorandum did not oblige Russia to agree to the coup in Ukraine in February 2014 and the actions of the Ukrainian radicals that undermined the sovereignty of the Ukrainian state, Lavrov said.
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