Ukraine/Nuclear weapons

Ukraine/Nuclear weapons
Ukraine held about one third of the Soviet nuclear arsenal.

Ukraine as part of the Soviet Union and had a third of all Soviet nuclear weapons in its territory.

Wikipedia lists:

• 130 UR-100N intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) with six warheads each
• 46 RT-23 Molodets ICBMs with ten warheads each
• 33 heavy bombers
• totaling approximately 1,700 pieces
• (not explicitly mentioned by Wikipedia, but this likely includes a number of smaller tactical nukes as well, ie mini-nukes/mines and rockets of shorter range)

Following the agreements reached in 1994 in the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine agreed to destroy the weapons and to join the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).

Policy reconsideration

Before the start of military action by Russia in 2022, rearmament with nuclear weapons was brought up as a possibility by Volodymyr Zelensky in his speech during the Munich Security Conference on February 19, 2022.

Dmytro Kuleba (Ukraine foreign minister) in an interview said that Ukraine's nuclear disarmament wasn’t smart (mid February 2022).

In April 2019, Oleksandr Turchynov who at that time held the post of secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, said that "nuclear disarmament was a historic mistake" of Ukraine.

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