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this is nonsense; they agreed to it because they were paid a bunch of money including ongoing "support" to decommission weapons and they didn't have control or possession of the weapons anyway
no one at the meeting thought the fluff language about respecting sovereignty meant a security guarantee and even if they did the respecting sovereignty would mean the US complains to the UNSC on which Russia sits and can veto
and the US has satisfied this many magnitudes more than was necessary even if one believes the memo means something those who negotiated and signed it didn't believe and even if one believes it's in any way binding
the deal was they either get paid money or they get invaded to recapture the weapons and take them off Ukrainian territory right then and there
I'd also add that surely similar agreements were signed with other non-Russian former Soviet republics with nuclear weapons on their soil, namely Byelorussia and Kazakhstan. Maybe this also happened in Budapest, I have no idea, but probably not. Anyway, these agreements are long forgotten for a good reason, but I'm fairly sure they also didn't contain any clause that could be interpreted as "permission to enter the US orbit in the future with an additional security guarantee to deter a Russian invasion".
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What’s your estimation of Russia’s ability and willingness to fund and mount an invasion of all of Ukraine in 1994?
A US invasion is likewise absurd, the US did barely more than vaguely attempt to track the mountains of missing post-Soviet nukes, some of which made their way to far more hostile states.
There was no enemy at the gates that would have forcibly taken the nukes from them in 1994, that’s just the reality of the situation.
You claimed:
"Firm assurance" to do what? Under which conditions? For how long? What does "enter the US orbit" even mean? If the big pile of money wasn't the motivating factor but "respecting sovereignty" language was, then the Ukrainians are too stupid to be trusted with nuclear weapons anyway because "respecting sovereignty" fluff language in a memorandum is a far cry from "firm assurance" let alone "security guarantee."
No, the US didn't give security guarantees or "firm assurance [Ukraine] wouldn't be invaded by a foreign power" in 1994, over 5 years before it added Poland to NATO. It just didn't happen. No American nor any Russian who signed the memo thought that's what happened.
And besides, the US has already satisfied even stronger language. The US alone has sent hundreds of billions and enough equipment to equip an army larger than any other in Europe except Russia. The US has already all but fired weapons at Russians and engaged in other acts of war and the only reason it wasn't labeled as such is because the Russians don't want them to be acts of war but there is a line at some point.
It would be less "mount an invasion of all of Ukraine," and more "Moscow aligned soldiers who possessed the nuclear weapons would leave their bases and meet up with Russian soldiers coming across the border to secure the weapons and transport them to Russian territory," with American support, i.e., Americans were fine with this happening. Although if it became clear the Ukrainians attempted to seize and then traffic the weapons, I do not think it's absurd to think even a joint-operation would be on the table.
Ukraine couldn't use the nukes it "possessed" (but didn't), it would have to capture them and then disassemble them, obtain a trigger and then reassemble them before they would have had nuclear weapons. The status quo was Ukrainians didn't have useable nuclear weapons.
The question would be which Ukrainians were going to do this and with what army? Or which Ukrainians were going to stop the Moscow-aligned soldiers in in or before 1994 from doing it? The Ukrainian and Russian militaries didn't even disentangle for a decade after the memo.
It's easy to fall into this end-of-history re-remembering history. Admittedly, I'm not re-remembering anything, but I can read what contemporary people at the time were saying and the sort of implication that it was inevitable the US or others could do whatever and the Russians would do nothing is just nonsense. If you told someone in 1994 that the US was proxy fighting Russia not at the Rhein but at the Oskil River, they would have assumed the nukes already went flying and the world was destroyed.
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Had the Ukrainian government ever knowingly facilitated or permitted the trafficking of nuclear weapons from their country to any rogue state and the US government learned about it, I think it's fair to assume that this was going to result in a US military intervention to topple the government, as in Panama in 1989, and seize the weapons, because this was precisely the scenario the Budapest Memorandum was designed to prevent.
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