October 18, 2024
Putin calls Zelenskyy’s nuclear comments ‘a dangerous provocation’
Russian President Vladimir Putin criticized Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday after he commented about the hypothetical need for a nuclear deterrent.
At a meeting of NATO defense ministers a day earlier, Zelenskyy had said that “either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons, which will serve as protection, or it must be part of some kind of alliance.”
“This is a dangerous provocation,” Putin said on Friday at a meeting with journalists from the BRICS group of emerging economies. “Any step in this direction will be met with a corresponding reaction.”
“It is not difficult to create nuclear weapons in the modern world,” Putin added.
“I do not know whether Ukraine is capable of doing it now, it is not so easy for Ukraine of today, but in general there is no great difficulty here.”
However, Zelenskyy’s chief of staff insisted that the Ukrainian president’s comments had been misinterpreted.
“We have not these thoughts about nuclear, we refuse it,” Andriy Yermak told a think-tank event in Brussels.
Ukraine inherited the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Two years later, it agreed to hand these weapons over to Russia in exchange for security guarantees from both Moscow and Washington that its territorial integrity would be respected.
Russia began nuclear weapons exercises near the border with Ukraine earlier this year.
zc/wd (Reuters, AP; AFP, dpa)
