Ukraine May Have Already Reacquired Nuclear Weapons, Polish General Says

Ukraine handed over the last of its Soviet-era nuclear weapons to Russia in the mid-1990s after signing an agreement on security guarantees with Moscow and Washington. Last year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned Kiev might revoke its non-nuclear weapons status due to “Russian aggression.”

Owing to its large-scale nuclear potential, Ukraine may have already built a nuclear bomb, Polish General Waldemar Skrzypczak suspects.

“I do not rule out Ukraine having nuclear weapons, because the Ukrainians have nuclear power plants, scientists, laboratories and knowhow. In other words, everything they need to possess such a weapon. In fact, today no one is in a position to prohibit the Ukrainians from having it,” Skrzypczak, the former commander of Poland’s Land Forces, said in an interview with Polish media.

Last October, Russian Radiation, Chemical and Biological Troops chief Igor Kirillov said that Kiev has the technological potential and industrial base to build a radioactive dirty bomb, including over 1,500 tons of spent fuel from nuclear power plants, a uranium ore mining plant, and research centers in Kharkov and Kiev that proved instrumental in Soviet-era nuclear research.

Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu contacted his US, French, British, and Turkish counterparts the same month to convey Moscow’s concerns about Kiev’s potential employment of a dirty bomb to accuse Russia of a provocation. Ukrainian officials denied that the country possesses or plans to acquire such weapons, and emphasized Kiev’s strict adherence to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

However, last week, Ukrainian Ambassador to Germany Oleksiy Makeev announced Kiev’s desire to “begin a discussion” on the country’s nuclear status, saying that the 1994 Budapest Memorandum security agreement which led Ukraine to give up nukes proved a “bad signal for all countries in the world which realized that only nuclear weapons could save them” from an “aggressor” like Russia.

Last summer, former Polish Foreign and Defense Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said that Western powers could transfer nuclear weapons to Ukraine, given that Russia had “violated” the Budapest Memorandum.

President Zelensky threatened to renounce Kiev’s non-nuclear status and initiated consultations under the Budapest Memorandum at the Munich Security Conference in February 2022.

Ukraine’s pledge to do away with nuclear weapons dates back to before the Budapest Memorandum to Kiev’s July 1990 declaration of state sovereignty, which committed the republic “not to accept, produce, or acquire nuclear weapons.” All 1,700+ nuclear warheads that Kiev transferred to Moscow in the 1990s remained under Russia’s control via a nuclear football held by President Boris Yeltsin. Moscow signed the Budapest Memorandum on the understanding that Ukraine would remain a friendly, militarily non-aligned state – provisions which Kiev’s US backers violated repeatedly in color revolutions in 2005 and 2014. A 2019 law amended Ukraine’s constitution to put it on a “strategic course” to join NATO and the European Union.

Last March, Foreign Intelligence chief Sergey Naryshkin said Russia had intelligence to confirm that Ukraine was working on a nuclear weapon, and that Washington knew about it. Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned Moscow would consider attempts to create even a tactical nuclear weapon by Kiev as a “strategic threat” to Russia.