Ukraine’s President Zelensky hints at developing nuclear weapons after NATO declares it will not confront Russia
Furious at NATO’s decision to stay out of the conflict, Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, has warned that his country, battling Russian forces, could develop atomic weapons. “All that the alliance (NATO) could do today was to allocate some 50 tons of diesel fuel for Ukraine through its procurement system,” Zelensky said, in a videotaped address. In a veiled nuclear threat, he added: “Probably, it’s for us so that we can burn the Budapest Memorandum. To make it burn better. But for us it has already burned down in the fire of the Russian troops,” Zelensky was referring to the 1994 document, which guided Ukraine’s surrender of its nuclear arsenal inherited from the former Soviet Union. The memorandum gave security assurances to three ex-Soviet countries—Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus—following which, along with other agreements signed between 1993-96, the trio gave up its atomic weapons. The war between Russia and Ukraine has already exposed a nuclear dimension, including