On September 10 a group of more than two dozen well-known Ukrainian scientists, scholars, artists, writers and parliamentarians published an open letter (Kyiv Post, September 11) appealing to the governments of the United States, Great Britain, France and China with a proposal to organize an international conference of the guarantor states regarding paragraph 6 of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, "with the aim of providing real guarantees of security to Ukraine, proclaimed in the Memorandum."
Jamestown's Vladimir Socor comments that while the letter has been more or less ignored by Western media, it underlines the major security implications for Europe of Russia's new willingness to use military force unilaterally beyond its borders (since the Russia-Georgia war of 2008 known as the "Medvedev Doctrine"). A "de-mothballing" of the Budapest Memorandum could also, Socor believes,
help limit the intrusion of Russia's strategic agenda into Ukraine's presidential election campaign. Such intrusion demonstrated its explosive potential in Ukraine's 2004 presidential election. The security environment around Ukraine has since deteriorated markedly, and at an accelerating rate in recent months. The OSCE's upcoming year-end meeting would be the right venue for a reaffirmation of the Budapest Memorandum, 15 years after the same organization affirmed its support for the memorandum's signing.
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