Recently, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky alarmed the international public by hinting at the prospect of Ukraine’s nuclear rearmament.
During his speech at a meeting of the European Council in Brussels on October 17, Zelensky shouted Ukraine’s decision to surrender nuclear weapons inherited from the Soviet Union in exchange for security obligations from nuclear states – the United States, Britain and Russia – enshrined in the Budapest Memorandum from 1994. (China and France pledged similar security guarantees in separate letters.) The Budapest Memorandum commitments have spectacularly failed to prevent Russian aggression against Ukraine. How does Ukraine ensure its security? Zelensky outlined two options: “Either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons, and then it will be a defense for us, or Ukraine will join NATO. The NATO countries are not at war today. All people live in NATO countries. And that is why we choose NATO over nuclear weapons.”
On the same day, Zelensky revealed that he had done so issued a similar message to presidential candidate Donald Trump during his visit to the United States in late September, adding that Trump responded that his reasoning made sense.
However, at a press conference with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte later that day, Zelenskyy walked back his comments, stressing that Ukraine has no intention of pursuing nuclear weapons. Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry rushed to confirm the country’s commitment to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as a non-nuclear weapon state. separate statement.
Zelensky’s rhetoric can be read as a credible threat or as a desperate bluff to convince the West to extend a NATO invitation to Ukraine – the key item on Zelensky’s recently revealed “victory plan.” But maybe it’s none of those things. Zelensky’s recent statements may be a reminder of Ukraine’s contribution, in good faith, to nuclear non-proliferation in the early 1990s, to today’s dire security situation, and to the need to find a solution for the long-term security of Ukraine and to maintain lasting peace in the country. Europe.
“NATO or nuclear weapons” – again. Zelensky’s proposal is not new for Ukraine. Shortly after Russia occupied and annexed Crimea in 2014 and fueled the war in the Donbas, some Ukrainian politicians called for the intake from the NPT and the renewal of Ukraine’s nuclear program. In the spring of 2021, as Russian troops gathered on Ukraine’s borders, Andriy Melnyk, then Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, gained fame by to report that if NATO membership is not extended to Ukraine, the country will have little choice but to “arm itself, and perhaps rethink its nuclear status,” adding: “How else can we guarantee our defense? ”
On February 19, 2022, just five days before Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Zelensky said in a speech to the Munich Security Conference: sounded a similar toneIf Ukraine does not receive real security guarantees, it will have “every right to believe that the Budapest Memorandum does not work and that all 1994 package decisions are questionable,” referring to Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament and membership of the NPT.
Ukrainian nuclear weapons? Probably not. Now that Zelensky has resurrected the “NATO or nuclear weapons” proposal, he could be taking a page from an old playbook used successfully in the past by other US allies and partners by stoking fears of nuclear proliferation in return for a more robust security guarantee: Ukraine’s NATO membership. Cold War-era West Germany, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea all successfully leveraged their nuclear latency to strengthen America’s commitment to their security. (Indeed, it was one of the objectives of the South African nuclear program before it was dismantled in 1991, and it could likely be present in Israel’s current nuclear analysis.)
However, for this strategy to succeed, a country must have a credible capacity to develop nuclear weapons. It has at least been said that Ukraine will be able to develop an operational nuclear deterrent during this war or even within the next decade very unlikely. Ukraine lacks a full fuel cycle and other critical elements of a nuclear weapons program that would take time to build and entail significant economic, political and international costs.
Even if Ukraine were to raise the necessary resources to launch a nuclear weapons program, Russia and the United States will not stand idly by as Ukraine makes progress toward the bomb. Ukraine would lose the support of the West on which it heavily depends for its security and economic survival, its progress towards EU membership would likely come to a halt and Russia would do everything in its power to nip Ukraine’s weapons program in the bud to smother.
Zelensky’s ‘NATO or nuclear weapons’ as a ploy for immediate NATO membership lacks credibility and is unlikely to succeed as a strategy.
A problem in search of a solution. Whatever the merits of Zelensky’s ruse, the international community cannot blame him for stating the obvious: NATO members are at peace under their nuclear umbrella while Ukraine is at war. Russia and NATO exercise restraint toward each other, based on the shared understanding that a direct conventional confrontation between two nuclear-armed adversaries would carry the inherent risk of nuclear escalation and possibly nuclear war. Russia shows no similar restraint toward a non-nuclear, non-allied Ukraine. To make matters worse, Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling has managed to partially influence the timing and terms of Western arms deliveries to Ukraine, hampering Ukraine’s defense efforts. In short, peace is the prerogative of those fortunate enough to benefit from nuclear deterrence. The unfortunate must suffer war.
But security, it turns out, is not private property, but an international public good. The festering war in Ukraine and its consequences for Europe and beyond show that peace on the continent cannot be sustainable without a solution to Ukraine’s security problem.
The essential logic of Ukraine’s security situation, as outlined by Zelenskiy, cannot be dismissed as easily as Ukraine’s non-existent nuclear weapons capabilities. If no solution is found, it will continue to evoke a nuclear option. In a post-Cold War world, denuclearized Ukraine found itself in a security vacuum: a buffer zone between an expanded NATO and a revisionist Russia. Ukraine’s non-nuclear, non-allied status failed as a security strategy. What are Ukraine’s other options for a lasting security solution that would allow the country to live in peace and prosper in the future? One obvious option is to join a military alliance that has proven effective in deterring Russian aggression through mutual defense commitments and U.S. security guarantees. If that doesn’t happen, Ukraine will be left to fend for itself with whatever resources it can muster. In an essentially asymmetrical power relationship between Russia and Ukraine, nuclear weapons will continue to be seen in Ukraine as a great equalizer.
Given this irrefutable logic, it is no wonder that the Ukrainians continue to draw attention to their decision surrendering the Soviet Union’s nuclear legacy and placed faith in international security institutions such as the UN and the NPT, which ultimately failed them. It is also no wonder that the moral high ground gained by Ukraine’s unprecedented nuclear standoff is little consolation to the masses who lost their lives, limbs and livelihoods on Ukraine’s killing fields. It is also not surprising that most Ukrainians now view the decision to disarm with regret support nuclear rearmament following the dovish response of the United States and Britain – the other signatories of the Budapest Memorandum – to Russia’s first violation of it in 2014.
Putting Ukraine’s nuclear ghosts to rest. In the current political and security environment, Ukraine’s capacity to develop nuclear weapons is limited. But if this war has taught us anything, it’s what seemed utterly impossible yesterday – like Ukraine surviving a full-scale Russian attack for more than 72 hours, sinking the flagship cruiser of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and deep into the Russian homeland reached. Tomorrow it will be possible to attack strategic bomber bases with domestically developed drones, direct German tanks or pilot American F-16 fighter jets.
However, the future extends much further than tomorrow.
Institutions like the NPT, which have helped prevent uncontrolled nuclear proliferation in the past, are show serious tensions and could no longer be effective in a few decades. U.S. nonproliferation policy could not be a priority for a future administration seeking to detach itself from international affairs. Meanwhile, nuclear weapons have been with us for almost eighty years, and despite the best arms control and disarmament efforts, they are not going away anytime soon. All nuclear powers are modernizing their nuclear arsenals – and some are rapidly expanding them. Russia will remain a nuclear power, and Ukraine its neighbor. Without major changes in Russia on the scale of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the security situation in Ukraine will remain precarious and the need for a deterrent against a nuclear-armed Russia will be acute in the near future.
The ghosts of Ukraine’s nuclear past, non-nuclear war-torn present and an imagined nuclear future will undoubtedly haunt the ruins of Ukraine’s bombed cities and mine-infested black earth fields, the souls of those who died in Ukraine. this war, and the consciousness of the survivors for decades to come.
Only a sustainable, long-term security solution, such as that of NATO membership to deter a nuclear Russia, can put to rest the specter of nuclear-armed Ukraine. Without such a solution, Ukrainians and their president will continue to expose the hypocrisy of those countries outraged by mentioning Ukraine’s nuclear ambitions – real or imagined – while basing their security on a nuclear deterrent or hiding comfortably under US nuclear ambitions. umbrella, both of which are denied to Ukraine.