Putin warns he will not allow Ukraine to have nuclear weapons ‘under any circumstances’

Neither joining NATO nor having nuclear weapons to protect itself: Russian President Vladimir Putin has made it clear that the Kremlin will prevent Ukraine from trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction if it does not succeed in securing membership in the Atlantic Alliance. “Russia will not allow this under any circumstances,” Putin stressed Friday in a meeting with several media from the countries that make up the BRICS group of emerging powers, which will hold a summit next week. In addition, Putin reiterated that he wants total victory over Ukraine, and that this includes ensuring Kyiv does not join NATO. On Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy revealed that during his conversation with Donald Trump in New York last September, he told the Republican presidential candidate that Kyiv might be tempted to obtain nuclear weapons if Washington rejects its NATO membership, as a protection mechanism, although Zelenskiy later clarified that neither a nuclear program “nor anything like that” is part of his plans.

“Any step in this direction will be met with a corresponding reaction,” Putin warned about a hypothetical Ukrainian nuclear program. The Russian president also declared that he will pursue the war until he achieves the victory he yearns for. “The Russian army is becoming not only one of the most technologically advanced, but also the most combat-ready. And when NATO members get tired of fighting us, we will remain ready to continue this fight. And victory will be ours,” he said.

Putin has stated that Moscow “is interested in ending the conflict in Ukraine as soon as possible,” although he has made any hypothetical talks conditional on the Istanbul negotiations of March 2022, which broke down after Ukrainian troops discovered the Bucha massacre. 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 from October 22-24. According to Moscow, UN Secretary General António Guterres and delegations from 24 countries, including the nations that make up the platform — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates — will attend.

Zelenskiy’s comments on weapons of mass destruction have been a wake-up call for NATO countries. Kyiv claims that it gave up the nuclear arsenal it inherited after the collapse of the USSR in exchange for the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia guaranteeing its sovereignty and protection by signing the Budapest Memorandum in 1994. However, it was left unprotected when Moscow illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, deployed troops in the Donbas region that same year and, finally, launched an all-out offensive on Ukraine in 2022.

The Kremlin has always used a nuclear program that has never existed as one of its pretexts for invading Ukraine. In February 2022, days before Putin gave his troops the order to advance, Zelenskiy remarked at the Munich Security Conference that if Ukraine’s security was not guaranteed, Kyiv “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 Moscow’s ally, Iran, has rolled out. “Even then they were talking about Ukraine having nuclear weapons,” the Russian leader said on Friday.

Moscow has also used a recurring accusation in 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,” wrote the deputy chairman of the Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, on his Telegram channel. During 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 Kyiv to negotiate.

Adding to the confusion, Zelenskiy’s statements were joined by a rumor based on an anonymous source spread by a German tabloid on Thursday, which stated Ukraine could develop nuclear weapons in a “matter of weeks.” “We officially deny the insinuations of anonymous sources in the Bild publication about Ukraine’s alleged plans to develop weapons of mass destruction,” the Ukrainian government told the news agency Efe.

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