QUOTE : Ukraine’s political engagement with the West began in earnest in January 1994 with the signing of a deal brokered by the United States, according to which Ukraine gave up the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the USSR—potentially the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. In the Budapest Memorandum signed in December of that year, the United States, Russia, and Great Britain provided security assurances to Ukraine, which joined the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as a nonnuclear state. While many in Kyiv questioned the prudence of giving up nuclear weapons (the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, one of the Budapest Memorandum guarantors of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, would strengthen their case in 2014), there were significant benefits to be gained at the time. Ukraine ended its de facto international isolation as a country previously refusing to join the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and became the third-largest recipient of US foreign aid, after Israel and Egypt.