MUNICH. When Ukraine abandoned the huge arsenal of nuclear weapons left on its territory after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it famously struck a deal with Washington, London and Moscow, exchanging weapons for guarantees of its security and borders.
No wonder the Ukrainian government is wondering what happened to that guarantee.
But Russian President Vladimir Putin is complaining about something else entirely: He is spinning a conspiracy theory—possibly as a pretext to take over the entire country—that Ukraine and the United States are secretly plotting to return nuclear weapons to the country.
Mr. Putin’s arguments took up a third of his speech to the Russian people on Monday, when he made a series of bizarre accusations that “Ukraine intends to build its own nuclear weapons, and this is not just bragging.” Then he built a second case, that the United States is turning its missile defense system into an offensive weapon and plans to deploy nuclear weapons on the territory of Ukraine.
Ukraine abandoned the vast arsenal of nuclear weapons left over from the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and used fuel from its diluted warheads to power its nuclear power plants. Today, Ukraine doesn’t even have the basic infrastructure to produce nuclear fuel, although Mr. Putin has made the dubious claim that it can quickly find that talent.
For their part, US officials have repeatedly said they have no plans to deploy nuclear weapons in the country — and never have, especially since Ukraine is not a member of NATO.
But that hasn’t stopped Mr. Putin from constructing a hypothetical case that all of this could someday happen, potentially putting Moscow at risk. He followed up on the subject at another press conference on Tuesday, covering a number of conspiracy theories that, taken together, could well create a pretext to take over the entire country.
“If Ukraine acquires weapons of mass destruction, the situation in the world and in Europe will change dramatically, especially for us, for Russia,” he said. “We cannot fail to respond to this real danger, especially since, I repeat, Ukraine’s Western patrons can help it acquire these weapons in order to create another threat to our country.”
Mr. Putin has, of course, made such arguments before, but usually as a digression rather than as an excuse for urgent action. And this was very different from the tone of Moscow 30 years ago, when Russian nuclear scientists were voluntarily retrained to use their skills for peaceful purposes, and nuclear weapons were removed from Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan at the expense of American taxpayers.
“This is a great tragedy,” said Rose Gottemoeller, who negotiated the new START treaty with Russia and is now a student at Stanford University. “Putin is so wrapped up in his own grievances that he doesn’t remember how we worked together so closely – Americans, Ukrainians and Russians – to ensure that the collapse of the Soviet nuclear arsenal did not lead to the creation of three new nuclear powers.”
In fact, Mr. Putin is now using a key agreement of the era, called the Budapest Memorandum, to bolster his position. The memorandum, signed by Ukraine, the United States, Britain and Russia, sealed the central deal: Ukraine would surrender all of its nuclear arsenal remaining on its territory, and in return the other three countries would guarantee Ukraine’s security and the integrity of its borders. . (Although Ukraine had physical control over the weapons, the right to launch them remained in the hands of the Russians.)
Updated
February 23, 2022 7:11 pm ET
However, the memorandum never specified what this security guarantee entailed, nor did it promise military assistance in the event of an attack. But Mr. Putin flagrantly violated that agreement when he annexed Crimea in 2014, and did so again on Monday when he recognized the two breakaway republics, essentially saying they were no longer part of Ukraine.
He said this week that he was outraged that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was talking publicly about revising the memorandum. Mr. Zelenskiy’s complaint, voiced at the Munich Security Conference last weekend, is that a “guarantee” is not at all a guarantee against a nation with Russia’s coercive power.
Mr. Putin argued that if Ukraine doubts the memorandum, it must want to have its own nuclear arsenal.
“We believe that Ukrainian words are addressed to us,” Putin said at a press conference with the Azerbaijani president on Tuesday. “And we heard them. They have broad nuclear competence since Soviet times, a developed nuclear industry, they have schools, everything you need to move quickly.”
Understand how the Ukrainian crisis unfolded
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Failed diplomatic efforts. That United StatesNATO and Russia were involved in whirlwind of diplomacy prevent the escalation of the conflict. In December, Russia put forward a series of demands, including guarantees that Ukraine would never join NATO. The West rejected these demands and threatened economic repercussions.
Perhaps realizing that he might be exaggerating the threat, Mr. Putin said: “One thing they don’t have is a uranium enrichment program. But this is a technical issue. For Ukraine, this is not an unsolvable problem; it’s easy to solve.”
Of course, other countries have solved this problem, including Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, Israel and India. But this is a long, extremely complex process. Iran has been doing this for two decades and, according to Western intelligence estimates, still does not possess nuclear weapons. (A new deal to contain Iran and restart the 2015 nuclear deal is expected to be announced in the coming weeks, and officials say Russia, a party to the original deal, helped negotiate.)
Mr. Putin also complained that Ukraine has “the means to deliver such weapons” and that he is in a safer position here. The old rocket factory, a relic of Soviet times, continues to work – and was at the center of controversy a few years ago about whether his developments fell into the hands of the North Koreans. (Ukraine’s president at the time, Petro O. Poroshenko, denied this.) Mr. Putin acknowledged that Ukraine’s current arsenal is incapable of striking Moscow. But with the help of NATO and the West, he said, “it’s only a matter of time.”
He then turned his ire on Washington itself, relying on the argument that it should withdraw all of its nuclear weapons from Europe—and, of course, from the countries of the former Soviet bloc that joined NATO. He argued that an anti-missile system stationed in Poland and Romania, designed to defend against Iran, could be covertly converted into an offensive system that would threaten Russia.
“In other words, the supposedly defensive US missile defense system is developing and expanding its new offensive capabilities,” Putin said. He did not mention a United States proposal to negotiate a new arms control agreement that would limit the number of facilities on both sides.
Again, he said, “it’s only a matter of time” when Ukraine is accepted into NATO and becomes a launching pad for possible attacks on Russia.
“We clearly understand that under such a scenario, the level of military threats to Russia will increase sharply, by several times,” Putin said. “And I would like to emphasize at this point that the risk of a sudden strike against our country will increase many times over.”
His message seemed clear: The only way for Ukraine not to become a US weapons platform was to take it over or turn control over to a friendly government.