Neither join NATO nor have nuclear weapons to protect themselves. Russian President Vladimir Putin has made it clear that his country will prevent Ukraine from trying to acquire these weapons of mass destruction if its entry into the Atlantic Alliance is not successful. “I can say right away that Russia will not allow this under any circumstances,” the president stressed this Friday in a meeting with several media outlets from the countries that make up the BRICS group of emerging powers, which will hold a summit next week. Furthermore, Putin has once again stressed that he only wants total victory over Ukraine, and this includes in its original objectives that it not enter NATO. On Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky revealed that in his conversation with Donald Trump in New York last September, he told the Republican candidate that kyiv could be tempted to possess nuclear weapons if Washington rejects its accession to NATO, as a protection mechanism, although he later clarified that neither the nuclear program “or anything like that ” come into their plans.
“Any step in that direction will provoke an appropriate response (from Russia),” Putin has warned about a hypothetical Ukrainian nuclear program. Furthermore, he has stated that will continue his war until you achieve the victory you long for. “The Russian army is becoming not only one of the most technological, but also the most combat-ready. And when NATO members get tired of fighting us, we will still be ready to continue this fight. And the victory will be ours,” he warned.
The Russian president has stated that his regime “is interested in ending the conflict in Ukraine as soon as possible”, although he has made any hypothetical conversation subject to the negotiations in Istanbul in March 2022, which broke down after the discovery by Ukrainian troops of the Bucha massacre, one of the hardest attacks of the Russian offensive. One of the Kremlin’s demands is that NATO definitively reject Ukraine’s future entry into the alliance.
Putin hopes to receive international support at the BRICS meeting, which will take place in the Russian city of Kazan between October 22 and 24. According to Moscow, UN Secretary General António Guterres and delegations from 24 countries will attend, including the nations that make up the platform – Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates.
Zelensky’s statements on weapons of mass destruction have been a wake-up call to NATO countries. kyiv denounces that its country renounced the nuclear arsenal inherited from the USSR in exchange for the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia guaranteeing its sovereignty and protection by signing the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. However, it was left unprotected when Moscow illegally annexed Crimea. In 2014, it introduced its troops into the Ukrainian region of Donbas that same year and finally launched an all-out offensive on Ukraine in 2022.
The Kremlin has always argued as one of his pretexts for the invasion of Ukraine a nuclear program that has never existed. In February 2022, days before Putin gave his troops the order to advance, Zelensky only remarked at the Munich Security Conference that if Ukraine’s security was not guaranteed, his country “will have every right to believe that the Budapest Memorandum does not work and its entire package of decisions from 1994 is in doubt.” However, Putin assumes that kyiv has always planned to develop a nuclear program like the one its ally Iran has had. “At that time they were already talking about Ukraine should have nuclear weapons,” the Russian leader said this Friday.
Moscow has also once again used a recurring accusation in these two and a half years of war with which the Kremlin tries to sow doubts among kyiv’s supporters. “The Nazi regime is trying to create a dirty bomb,” the vice president of the Security Council, Dmitri Medvedev, wrote on his Telegram channel. In the most favorable moments of the war for Ukraine, The West feared that Russia would use this type of nuclear device (conventional explosives surrounded by radioactive material) to provoke a military escalation and force the rival to negotiate.
Furthermore, to add to the confusion, Zelensky’s statements have been joined by a rumor based on an anonymous source reported this Thursday by a German tabloid. “We officially deny the insinuations from anonymous sources in the publication Bild about Ukraine’s alleged plans to develop weapons of mass destruction,” the Ukrainian Government declared to the Efe agency.
