Ukraine does not want to “create a danger to the world, nor any nuclear weapons,” Zelensky said on Friday in an interview with several journalists broadcast on Ukrainian television. It is important to him to “be understood very precisely.”
Zelensky said at the EU summit on Thursday: “Either Ukraine has nuclear weapons that serve as protection, or it must be a member of an alliance.” “We don’t know of any alliance that is as efficient” as NATO, he emphasized.
No nuclear armament planned
A little later, at NATO headquarters in Brussels, he rejected media reports that he had hinted at a possible rearmament of his country with nuclear weapons during his appearance at the EU summit. “We have never talked about preparing to build nuclear weapons,” the president said.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine had the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world. After receiving security guarantees from Russia and the USA, it handed over its nuclear weapons to Russia. These security guarantees, known as the Putin wants to expose European impotence and American hesitation””>Budapest Memorandum, required signatories to respect the territorial integrity and independence of Ukraine and other former Soviet republics.
His country “gave up its nuclear weapons” under the Budapest Memorandum for “the guarantee of security and territorial integrity” but “got nothing in return,” Zelensky said in the TV interview on Friday. The memorandum was violated without Russia being “stopped.”
“We are a peaceful state”
The Ukrainian president emphasized that Ukraine does not want to come back under a “nuclear umbrella” but rather NATO membership. “We are a peaceful state. Today, NATO is better than any kind of weapons. Especially such dangerous ones.”
The German government also tried to get things sorted out on Friday. At the EU summit in Brussels, Selenskyj pointed out Russia’s breach of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, said deputy government spokesman Wolfgang Büchner in Berlin. In it, Ukraine declared a renunciation of its own nuclear weapons, and in return Russia guaranteed Ukraine’s state sovereignty and integrity. “We see every day that Russia is not complying,” said Büchner.
Putin sees “dangerous provocation”
A spokesman for the Foreign Office in Berlin pointed out that Ukraine was “the only country in the world that has ever possessed nuclear weapons and given them up.” However, Russia is “trampling on the Budapest Memorandum.” The ministry spokesman also pointed out that Ukraine had last committed itself to the goal of nuclear disarmament in a world free of nuclear weapons in the summer of this year.
Kremlin boss Vladimir Putin dismissed Zelensky’s comments on Friday as a “dangerous provocation.” “There will be an appropriate reaction to every step in this direction,” Putin told foreign journalists. Putin said he did not know whether Ukraine was capable of developing a nuclear weapon, but added that this was “not difficult in the modern world.” He could definitely say “that under no circumstances will Russia allow this to happen,” Putin added.
