Kiev must become a nuclear power – MP
Ukraine must become a nuclear power to protect itself no matter the consequences, an opposition MP said on Tuesday. Becoming a member of NATO would not be enough to guarantee Kiev's security, Aleksey Goncharenko has argued.
This week marks the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Budapest Memorandum, which comprises three nearly-identical multilateral agreements with former parts of the USSR that had nuclear weapons stationed on their territories at the time the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine - which never had codes to activate the weapons - agreed to denuclearize in exchange for security assurances by Russia, the US, and UK.
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry issued a statement on Tuesday to complain that the document has not applied to Kiev since the US-backed armed coup of 2014. The anniversary, it said, is a good time to extend to Ukraine a formal invitation to NATO, it claimed.
”NATO is a good thing. But NATO will not defend us. Nuclear weapons would,” Goncharenko wrote in response on social media. “So we should disregard everything and everyone and make the bomb. Then we’ll figure things out.”
The MP also rebuked Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky for missing the opportunity to get a “normal peace treaty” with Russia and NATO membership before the 2023 ‘counteroffensive’.
He belongs to the party of former President Pyotr Poroshenko, who lost to Zelensky in the 2019 presidential election.
The Budapest Memorandum should serve as a reminder to Western leaders that the “development of European security architecture at the expense of Ukrainian interests rather than in alignment with them is doomed to fail,” the Foreign Ministry in Kiev has said in the statement. The country “will not accept any alternative, imitation, or substitute for a NATO membership with full rights,” it added.
Zelensky has recently been sending mixed messages on NATO membership, suggesting that Kiev would be willing to accept accession of only the territories currently under its control, or of all claimed territories without protection under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty.
Kiev claims that Ukraine was the third-largest nuclear power after Russia and the US, before agreeing to give up the weapons.
The Ukrainian government has denied having a secret nuclearization plan, after German media claimed last month a scheme was in place to weaponize atomic energy.
