Ukraine claims it could have nuclear weapons within weeks – Bild

Vladimir Zelensky has played the atomic card to leverage Western support

Kiev has the capability to build a nuclear weapon “in a few weeks,” a high-ranking Ukrainian official told Bild on Thursday after Vladimir Zelensky alluded to such a possibility.

Ukraine needs either membership in NATO or nuclear weapons, Zelensky said on Friday in Brussels, arguing in favor of his “victory plan” to end the conflict with Russia.

This prompted Bild to reveal that a Ukrainian official involved in weapons procurement told them “a few months ago” that Kiev was willing to go nuclear.

“We have the material, we have the knowledge. If the order is given, we will only need a few weeks to have the first bomb,” the unnamed official said, according to the German tabloid, adding that the West should “think less about Russia’s red lines and more about ours.”

In his speech on Thursday, Zelensky claimed to have informed former – and possibly future – US President Donald Trump about Kiev’s possible atomic aspirations.

“Speaking to Donald Trump, I told him: What is the way out for us? Either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons, and they will serve as protection, or we need to be in some kind of an alliance. We don’t know any effective alliances except NATO,” Zelensky said. He also claimed that Trump agreed with him.

The former president has made no mention of Zelensky’s nuclear proposal, however. In the time since their meeting, he also made the case in an interview that nuclear weapons were the greatest threat to humanity and that he had hoped to make a global deal on eventual denuclearization during his first term in the White House.

The leadership in Kiev has long argued that the US and its allies had an obligation to protect Ukraine because of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which the US, UK and Russia gave security guarantees in exchange for the removal of Soviet nuclear warheads from Ukraine’s territory. Moscow has maintained that the 2014 violent coup in Kiev put the West in breach of the memorandum and that a hostile, nuclear-armed Ukraine on its doorstep is an intolerable threat to its security.