Kiev should ‘disregard everything and everyone’ and 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, which the current government hopes will happen, is not enough, 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 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 did not work for Kiev after the US-backed armed coup of 2014. The anniversary, it said, is a good time to extend a formal invitation to NATO for Ukraine, 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’, which Goncharenko believes existed. He belongs to the party of former President Pyotr Poroshenko, who lost to Zelensky in the 2019 presidential election.

The Budapest Memorandum with Ukraine 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 Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said in the statement. The country “will not accept any alternative, imitation, or substitute for a NATO membership with full rights,” it added.

In recent statements, Zelensky has 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 accession 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 that it does.