The last Ukrainian city to host nuclear weapons regrets having given them up

Pervomaisk in southern Ukraine was one of those Soviet towns officially closed to the outside world. Local residents were allowed to visit, but few others, recalls Tania Stepul. The 54-year-old grocery store owner was born and spent her childhood just a few miles from the command center of the 46th Division of the Soviet 43rd Red Banner Missile Army. Stepul lived surrounded by perimeters protected by electrified barbed wire, minefields, machine gun nests, and hundreds of soldiers. Around her house were 86 silos containing ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads waiting to be fired in a world war.

“I remember those huge trucks that brought the rockets because they used to have to cut down the trees on the roads so they could get through,” recalls Stepul. She says she was not afraid to live in Pervomaisk. “In the 1990s, after independence, we believed that Russia would be our friend, so we gave up the missiles in exchange for security guarantees. Now we can say that it was a mistake to hand over those weapons.”

Ukraine is one of the few countries in history to have renounced its nuclear weapons. In 1991, when it gained independence, it was the third nuclear power in the world, after Russia and the United States. It had 176 Soviet strategic and tactical ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, designed for a global nuclear war. The Budapest Memorandum, a treaty signed in 1994 by Ukraine, Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom, sealed the return of these weapons to Russia in exchange for security commitments for the young Ukrainian state.

“Western leaders should reread the Budapest Memorandum to understand that they have failed us, that they have broken their commitments to protect us,” says Oleksi Melnik, co-director of the Razumkov Centre for Defence and Geopolitical Studies. Melnik stresses that the feeling among his fellow citizens is that denying Ukraine accession to NATO is once again a betrayal on the part of its allies.

Ukraine’s last intercontinental missile launcher was deactivated in Pervomaisk in 2001. The nuclear warheads were removed in the 1990s by technicians at the Pivdenmash ballistic missile plant in Dnipro. This plant produced a large part of the Soviet weapons aimed at the U.S. during the Cold War. On 21 November, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an attack on Pivdenmash with the Oreshnik, a prototype of a new hypersonic ballistic missile designed to be armed with nuclear warheads. On this occasion, its explosives were conventional. It is the first time in history that a rocket of this type has been used in an armed conflict.

Putin warned on November 28 that he would use the Oreshnik again if Ukraine continued to use Western long-range missiles against military facilities on Russian territory. This time, the Russian autocrat added, the target could be decision-making centres in Kyiv. Only the U.S. possesses defense systems capable of intercepting a rocket like the Oreshnik.

“Of course it was a mistake to lose this weapon, as they would not have invaded us with this as a deterrent,” says Valeriy Kuznetsov, a major in the Ukrainian army reserve and former missile launch officer at the Pervomaisk base. Today he works as a guide at the base’s museum, one of the few of its kind in the world. Kuznetsov sits at the control post he occupied for a decade, a capsule 45 meters underground. From there, together with another colleague, he operated the equipment to activate 10 nuclear missiles. What does he remember about that responsibility? “Sadness, because I had valuable knowledge, importance, and from one day to the next I was out of a job,” says the retired soldier.

Atomic bomb in a matter of months

Kuznetsov supports Ukraine re-arming itself with nuclear weapons, citing his confidence in this from a document that caused a stir this November. The National Institute for Strategic Studies (NISS), an agency under the Ukrainian presidency, prepared a report for the Ministry of Defense detailing that the country has the resources to produce a low-intensity tactical nuclear bomb within months. The NISS estimated that Ukraine has enough radioactive material to make 100 such bombs.

The first to open the debate was Volodymyr Zelenskiy. “Either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons, which will serve as protection, or it must be part of some kind of alliance. Apart from NATO, we do not know of such an effective alliance,” the Ukrainian president said he had told Donald Trump in September. In October, he repeated the same idea at a meeting in Brussels. “We are not building nuclear weapons. What I meant is that today there is no stronger security guarantee for us besides NATO membership,” Zelenskiy stressed in a subsequent meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte.

The issue has come back to the fore after The New York Times revealed on November 21 that several members of outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden’s team had proposed returning nuclear weapons to Ukraine. The information was published on the same day that Russia fired the Oreshnik.

Irina Marinets, 53, is a high school teacher in Pervomaisk. She has visited the missile museum many times with her pupils. When she was the same age as them, she would go with her school to the regimental bases in the region to give concerts on special occasions. They knew that the area was like a Swiss cheese of silos with nuclear warheads, but they felt protected. “If we had them now, everything would be easier. It would be a great idea to have them again,” says Marinets.

“I am not afraid of the atomic bomb, I am afraid of the Russian occupation,” explains Olena Hrisenko, a baker in Pervomaisk. She has friends in another southern Ukrainian city, Kherson, and knows from their testimonies what happened during the invaders’ presence before being liberated in November 2022: “The Russians had lists and were looking for people, former soldiers or their relatives. What nuclear weapons are you going to write about? We don’t have them anymore! But with them, I can tell you, we wouldn’t have suffered this war,” she says.

In the museum’s missile launch simulator, a visitor says that he wishes it were for Moscow. Kuznetsov gives a disapproving look: “These weapons exist to never be used. If even one of these rockets were to go off the rails, a missile response would be unleashed from both sides, and it would be the end of civilization.” Despite this threat, the Cold War veteran assumes that Putin’s warnings of a nuclear escalation are a bluff. His experience tells him that the 500 Russian ballistic missiles for this use inherited from the Soviet Union are useless because, in addition to constant maintenance, they must be decommissioned after two to five decades in service. Perhaps they have been replaced with new generations, such as the Oreshnik, which is what Putin claims. “The Russians lie and lie,” Kuznetsov replies, “they even lie when their mouths are shut.”

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