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Hey, Escalation listeners. Tyler McBrion here, one of the hosts of the show. We've got another

bonus episode for you.

This time, it's a portion of our interview with Mariana Boudierin, a Ukrainian academic at Harvard.

We talked to Mariana about the Budapest memo negotiations and the dynamics between Kiev, Washington, and Moscow at the end of the Cold War.

Here it is.

I wonder if you could tell us sort of why you found the Budapest memo such an interesting sort of pivot point in your research. So I stumbled upon the whole broader topic of Ukraine's

nuclear disarmament and diplomatic history of negotiating

Budapest memorandum almost by accident. I knew when I started my PhD research that I wanted

to do something that concerns Ukraine, partly because of my cultural competency and the knowledge

of language, partly because I figured, you and the knowledge of language,

partly because I figured, you know,

might as well contribute somehow to Ukraine,

even if through research and through writing and, you know,

adding to the general knowledge about that country.

And then almost by chance, I stumbled upon this topic of nuclear disarmament, and I thought,

well, I had some kind of theoretical framework that I wanted to pursue and use that just as a

case of.

But when I started looking into the empirics, into the actual

...