The current conflict in Ukraine will overshadow the discussion at the NPT review conference in August. We have already seen that here, in Vienna, at the IAEA Board of Governors meeting in March, and the current IAEA Board of Governors meeting, which took place in early June. There were attempts by some to either expel Russia from the IAEA or to expel Russia from the Board of Governors. People have wanted the number of Russians working at the IAEA that they should be reduced. So, this all is very non-productive and confrontational discourse.

Speaking at the Munich Conference on International Security on February 19, 2022, President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelenskiy threatened to invalidate the Budapest Memorandum unless security guarantees were provided to Kyiv. Under the diplomatic wording of the refusal of the “package decisions of 1994,” Zelenskiy, in particular, meant the possibility of revising Ukraine's accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as a non-nuclear state. After 2014, many Ukrainian politicians, journalists, and public figures made statements in a similar vein. The Ukrainian elite is convinced that if Ukraine had retained its nuclear potential, it would have avoided “Russian aggression”. Such a linear perception does not give a complete picture of how and under what conditions Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons, to what extent the existing potential corresponded to the goal of deterring Russia, and to what extent Ukraine would be ready to maintain a nuclear potential on its territory.

Donald Trump is unwilling to get bogged down in the confrontations currently seen in Europe, in particular when it relates to Ukraine. He is doing his best to throw off this part of the agenda from the United States. That took Angela Merkel to Sochi earlier this month, the very Sochi that she was so shortsighted to ignore in February 2014.

The question “What is a new European security architecture?” now requires an immediate and clear answer.