Russian officials are furious. According to the Newspaper, former Polish Foreign Minister Redoslaw Sikorski said in an interview on a Ukrainian internet channel that the supply of nuclear weapons to Ukraine could be justified. The ex-politician defends that Russia, by declaring war on Ukraine, violated the Budapest Memorandum (signed in 1994), which stipulates among other things that Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom pledged “to refrain from any threat or use of force against Ukraine”.
A declaration which did not take long to reach the ears of the Kremlin, in particular those of the head of the Duma of Russia, Viacheslav Volodin. Furious, the latter spoke about the words of Redoslaw Sikorski. “With such MEPs, Europeans are going to have much more serious problems than those they are already facing,” he said, referring to the energy crisis and the influx of refugees into Europe since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. “Sikorski is provoking a nuclear conflict in the center of Europe”, continued Viacheslav Volodin, before threatening the West: “If his suggestions are accepted, these countries (Ukraine and Poland, editor’s note) will cease to exist, just like the rest of Europe”.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Russia has said that it does not want a nuclear war. “Unless Ukraine has nuclear weapons,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said last month. But for the professor of the political science department of the University of Antwerp Tom Sauer, this will not happen, as he explains to the Newspaper“Supplying nuclear weapons to Ukraine would not be a solution and never will be […] Russia may have violated the memorandum, but that doesn’t mean Europe can just supply nuclear weapons. Then we would be making a mistake.”