Beyond promises: thirty years since the Budapest Memorandum

Serhii Plokhy is the author of The New York Times bestseller The Gates of Europe and Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize. His many acclaimed books, including Nuclear Folly, Atoms and Ashes, and The Last Empire, have been translated into over a dozen languages. He is Professor of History at Harvard University where he also serves as Director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Andrew Wilson is a Professor in Ukrainian Studies at University College London and a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. His book Ukraine Crisis: What the West Needs to Know was published by Yale in October 2014 in the UK and November in the USA. He has worked extensively on the comparative politics of post-Soviet states since 1990.

Mariana Budjeryn is a Senior Research Associate at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center Project on Managing the Atom (MTA). She is the author of Inheriting the Bomb: The Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), for which she won the 2024 William E. Colby Military Writers’ Award. Formerly, she held appointments of a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at MTA, and a visiting professor at Tufts University and Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. Mariana Budjeryn is a member of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academies of Sciences and a senior nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her research and analytical contributions appeared in the Journal of Cold War Studies, Nonproliferation Review, Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, War on the Rocks, and in the publications of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars where she is a fellow with the Global Europe program.

Moderating the discussion is Nataliya Gumenyuk, a Ukrainian journalist and author specialising in foreign affairs and conflict reporting. She is the CEO of the Public Interest Journalism Lab and Co-Founder and Lead Journalist of The Reckoning Project, which documents war crimes in Ukraine. Gumenyuk is the author of several documentaries and books, including The Lost Island: Tales From The Occupied Crimea, and Maidan Tahrir. Nataliya regularly writes for The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Rolling Stone, Die Zeit, and The Atlantic. Gumenyuk was also the co-founder and head of independent Ukrainian media Hromadske TV and Hromadske International for five years and is currently a Board Member. Gumenyuk is a Member of the Council for Freedom for Speech Under the President of Ukraine, as well as the Independent Media Council.