WAR IN UKRAINE“The Most Dangerous Possibility”: U.S. Fears of a Russia-Ukraine War, 30 Years Ago
On January 5, 1993, just days before Bill Clinton was inaugurated as U.S. president, the outgoing secretary of state, Lawrence Eagleburger, finished a 23-page memo to his successor, Warren Christopher, who would be taking over in a few weeks. The memo was a rundown of global hot spots “Ukraine not the most likely but certainly the most dangerous possibility,” he wrote.
On January 5, 1993, just days before Bill Clinton was inaugurated as U.S. president, the outgoing secretary of state, Lawrence Eagleburger, finished a 23-page memo to his successor, who would be taking over in a few weeks.
Two days earlier, Eagleburger’s boss, President George Bush, had traveled to Moscow to sign a major new arms-control treaty, START II, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin, a last-minute diplomatic victory at the end of Bush’s term that cemented the end of the Cold War nuclear tensions and signaled what many thought was a new beginning for the relationship between Moscow and Washington.
The memo to Warren Christopher was a rundown of global hot spots and places plagued by festering tensions — “as many troubles…as opportunities” — not the least of which was remnants of the Soviet Union, which had ceased to exist 13 months earlier.
The list included the danger of war in the former Yugoslavia and “a breakdown of reform in Russia and a reversion to some form of authoritarian rule.” He also warned of the danger of armed conflict between “Russia and any of a number of states on its periphery.”
“Ukraine not the most likely but certainly the most dangerous possibility,” he wrote.
Thirty years later, and almost one year into Russia’s full-scale invasion, Russia and Ukraine are now fighting the largest land war in Europe since World War II.
The memo is one of several newly declassified documents released this week by the National Security Archive, a nongovernmental organization housed at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The organization has successfully pushed to declassify other materials from the Clinton presidency, particularly regarding U.S. relations with Moscow under Yeltsin.
For U.S. policy in the initial years after the Soviet collapse, “the focus was clearly on Russia, despite Eagleburger’s note about Ukraine,” said Thomas Graham, who served in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during the Soviet Union and was Russia director on the White House National Security Council in the mid-2000s.
“It took a while to afford Ukraine anything close to the attention being paid to Russia,” he said.
