When Ukraine gave the USSR nuclear weapons that they had control of after the USSR collapse to Russia that decided it’s fate! Eventually it will re-absorbed back into Russia. Oh yeah the USA & UK guaranteed Ukrainian sovereignty if Ukraine gave up the weapons! Oh yes like we & UK would fight a nuclear war over Ukrainian independence!
I think it is a gross misconception. To bring things into perspective Ukraine inherited from USSR a military loosely equal to modern US military in terms of manpower and the number of assets, not counting warships. Its economy was about 30% of USSR which was only second to US and that alone made Ukraine in top ten nations economically.
The problem is that the looting started immediately after independence and it began to shrink at unprecedented scale reducing to about African status in just a few years.
Looting involved military assets and technology leading to proliferation of very sensitive tech which went to Iran, China and North Korea.
To think whatever ends justify allowing such country to maintain control over 4000 nukes and delivery systems is a pure insanity.
The United STATES never did any such thing.
2/3 of the representatives of those States united must, sitting in the Senate, ratify ANY such "guarantee" to make it binding, and that never happened.