It's interesting. The Intercept article's comparisons with Iran, Libya, and Pakistan are pretty strained for the reasons you gave. On the other hand, in exchang

It's interesting. The Intercept article's comparisons with Iran, Libya, and Pakistan are pretty strained for the reasons you gave. On the other hand, in exchange for handing over some dangerous items of great value Ukraine received some very explicit assurances about its security in the Budapest Memorandum, written assurances of a sort that Iran and Libya never received. If you're willing to zoom out a little bit the doing the right thing with nukes really did not work out for them argument still basically holds. Doing the wrong thing would have been dangerous and very expensive, but that's perhaps orthogonal to the original point.