At a meeting with European Union leaders on 17 October, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that if Ukraine does not get NATO membership it will develop nuclear weapons. Comments that drew an immediate response from Russian President Valdimir Putin who said Russia would not allow that to happen.
Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and since then has used both overt and tacit nuclear threats to try to intimidate western countries from intervening to stop it. These threats have been universally condemned with the first, unequivocal, multilateral condemnation coming from the members of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in June 2022. Western countries have responded by condemning Russia’s threats and incrementally increasing their conventional military support for Kyiv by providing more sophisticated weapons and intelligence to the Ukrainian armed forces to use.
Western governments have remained largely silent on the Ukrainian president’s latest comments, which are being seen as a veiled threat to push them into giving the Ukrainian leader the NATO membership he wants. At a joint press conference with NATO Secretary General, Mark Rutte, on 17 October, Mr Zelenskyy said his country is not developing nuclear weapons, but, given it has been reported that he made the same argument in his meeting with former US president Donald Trump in September, it seems unlikely he misspoke or has been misinterpreted.
The use of such nuclear rhetoric has escalated nuclear tensions with Russia further, as President Putin’s response on 18 October demonstrated when he said any move by Ukraine to develop such weapons would meet "an appropriate reaction". This kind of response is a common way for nuclear-armed states to react when an adversary talks of developing nuclear weapons. We have heard similar language from North Korea since South Korean politicians and analysts have speculated about developing nuclear weapons.
Ukraine developing nuclear weapons would have serious ramifications for global security because it would also involve Kyiv leaving the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) which would deal a serious blow to the treaty which almost all countries have joined.
The Ukrainian leader has tried to reinforce his case by repeating the claim that Ukraine gave up the nuclear weapons it inherited after the collapse of the Soviet Union in return for security guarantees that were not honoured when Russia attacked it. Yet this is not wholly accurate.
Under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the United States, Russia and Britain did promise to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and committed to seek to assist Ukraine through the United Nations Security Council if it was a victim of aggression, so Russia’s invasion and the western powers’ failure to do more to protect it can be seen as a breach of that agreement.
However, while it is true Ukraine returned the weapons that were on its soil to Russia after it became independent, most experts agree it did not have command or control over those weapons because that was carried out from Russian territory, so whether or not Ukraine could have held onto working nuclear weapons at that time is speculation rather than fact.
The Executive Director of ICAN, Melissa Parke, said: “Each additional threat, whether veiled or open, and any escalation in nuclear rhetoric adds to the risk of catastrophe. It is driven by narrow and short-sighted conceptions of national security, where the possession and brandishing of nuclear weapons is regarded as a justified response to foreign threats. Ukraine and Russia must exercise restraint and avoid escalating nuclear tensions further”.
Ms Parke continued: “This is why a growing number of countries are joining the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). They recognise that the total elimination of nuclear weapons is a global security imperative, and is the responsibility of all states, not just those with nuclear weapons. As the risks of use of nuclear weapons grow, driven by threats, inflammatory rhetoric and the increasing prominence of nuclear weapons in security policies and doctrines, the international community’s response must be to stigmatise and delegitimise nuclear weapons and to build a robust global norm against them. The TPNW offers the most practical way forward for this”.