“No, that is not being considered,” assured Jake Sullivan this Sunday. “What we are doing is reinforcing Ukraine’s various conventional capabilities so that it can effectively defend itself in the fight against the Russians, not nuclear capabilities.”
The United States has definitively ruled out the idea of reinstalling Ukraine’s nuclear weapons, Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s national security advisor, assured this Sunday in a statement.
The clarification comes after the New York Times reported a month ago, citing Western sources on condition of anonymity, that the American president was considering returning nuclear weapons to Ukraine before completing his term and passing the baton to Donald Trump, who takes office in January 20th.
Asked about the news, Sullivan responded: “No, that is not being considered. What we are doing is reinforcing Ukraine’s various conventional capabilities so that it can effectively defend itself in the fight against the Russians, not nuclear capabilities.”
When it became independent in 1991, Ukraine possessed the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, which, according to the Arms Control Association, included around 1,900 nuclear warheads, 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles and 44 strategic bombers.
Over the next five years, however, in exchange for guarantees of economic and security support from Moscow and also Washington.
The agreement emerged in the context of the nuclear disarmament campaign implemented by the United States and Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, to prevent them from falling into the hands of rogue states, terrorist organizations and other non-state actors.
Number 2 of Russia’s MNE said yesterday that Moscow does not exclude the possibility of resuming tests of its nuclear weapons, something that Russia has not done since 1990, after the fall of the USSR (AP)
The so-called Budapest Memorandum was signed in 1994 by Kiev, Washington, Moscow and London, under the promise that Ukraine would have guaranteed its security in the face of the threat of the use of force against its territory, its independence or sovereignty. In return, the country committed to signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear state.
In 2014, after Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula, in what everyone now sees as a first step towards a full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the US, UK and Ukraine accused Russia of violating the Budapest Memorandum. Last year, Vladimir Putin also withdrew Russia from the treaty banning nuclear weapons testing.
The news that the USA is not considering supporting Ukraine with nuclear weapons comes after Russia has changed its doctrine for the use of this type of weapons, now foreseeing the possibility of using them in response not only to an attack that threatens its survival but also to any attack that represents a “critical threat” to its sovereignty and territorial integrity, now that Kiev is already using US long-range weapons in the theater of combat.
Following this key change, a senior Kremlin official admitted this weekend that Moscow continues to consider resuming nuclear weapons testing, something Russia has not carried out since 1990.
“This is an open question,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told the TASS news agency on Saturday, when asked whether Moscow is considering this hypothesis.
“Without anticipating anything, let me simply say that the situation is quite difficult”, said the deputy of Russian diplomacy. The resumption of nuclear weapons tests, he further said, “is being constantly considered in all its components and in all its aspects”.
