A nuclear weapon in Ukraine’s arsenal would be powerless to stop Russia, which has an overwhelming military advantage, including in the quantity of such weapons, Vladimir Zelensky's top advisor has said.
In a post on Telegram on Thursday, Mikhail Podoliak, the advisor to the Ukrainian leader's head of office, dismissed speculation that Ukraine could develop a nuclear weapon to check Russian advances, despite earlier media reports suggesting that some officials in Kiev were contemplating the idea.
He stressed that “it is important not to confuse the concept of ‘nuclear weapons’ with an ‘optimal deterrence option.’” Podoliak added that even if Ukraine were to create such a weapon in the foreseeable future – which he insists is not on the table – it “cannot deter the empire with the second largest nuclear arsenal in the world.”
Russia actually has almost 5,900 nuclear warheads, surpassing the US, which has an arsenal of around 5,200, according to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
Podoliak noted that rumors about a Ukrainian nuclear bomb are designed “to downplay the West’s reluctance to use truly destructive weapons against the Russian empire,” adding that Kiev’s backers could enforce a stricter sanctions regime, target Moscow’s oil revenue, and hand over to Ukraine Russian sovereign assets frozen in Western banks.
The Times reported earlier this week, citing a document by a Ukrainian think tank, that officials in Kiev believe they could within several months create a plutonium-based atomic bomb akin to the one the US dropped on Nagasaki in 1945 by using fissile materials from its nuclear power plants.
The document cited by the British newspaper suggested that Ukraine could use such a weapon to attack Russian air bases, industrial or logistical facilities, or troop concentrations.
While Ukraine has insisted that it has no plans to develop nuclear weapons, Zelensky said last month that the country had two options to protect itself – either acquire a nuclear weapon or join NATO, a possibility the US-led bloc has refused to consider while Ukraine is in a state of conflict.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that while “it is not difficult to create a nuclear weapon in the modern world,” there is no scenario in which Moscow would allow Ukraine to become a nuclear power.