Ukraine would need a million-man army, including contingents of soldiers from allied nations, a nuclear deterrent, and batteries of advanced missiles to deter future Russian aggression if it isn’t allowed to join NATO, President Volodymyr Zelensky has said.
Ukraine gave up its Cold War-legacy nuclear arsenal in the 1990s “for nothing” and would seek to acquire nuclear bombs again if it wasn’t able to quickly join NATO in the aftermath of the present war or a ceasefire, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Monday.
The Ukrainian president told British broadcaster Piers Morgan in an interview published on Tuesday night that, from his perspective, letting Ukraine into the NATO alliance would be a considerably better deal for its members because it would be so much cheaper. With NATO membership, Russia would not dare invade, he believes, but the level of security guarantees required to keep Moscow polite otherwise would be ruinously expensive.
To keep Ukraine secure without NATO would mean Ukraine’s allies funding a million-man army, including troop “contingents” from Western nations as peacekeepers or reinforcements, funding missile systems to keep the skies clear, and Ukraine acquiring its own nuclear deterrent.
He said, per the Piers Morgan show’s translation: “If not NATO, we will need to sustain a million [man] army, but the hundreds of thousands that we have will not be enough, they are on the offense and we do not have enough… That is huge money… so that’s why I think NATO is the cheapest option. If not NATO, then we must [build] this huge army with huge money, that means contingents from our partners, and undoubtedly that is a big deterrence missile package against the Ruskis”.
Even if NATO membership was still a possibility in the future but delayed for years or even decades, Zelensky said he would still need such security guarantees. The President continued: “Which support package, which missiles? Will we be given nuclear weapons? Let them give us nuclear weapons… Give us back nuclear arms, give us missile systems, partners help us finance the one-million army, move your contingent on the part of our state where we want the stability of the situation. So the people have tranquillity.”
Zelensky also mourned the decision in the 1990s for Ukraine to relinquish its massive Cold War-era stocks of nuclear weapons, inherited from the Soviet Union, which he said had been forced on his country by Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom deciding for them. He told Morgan that Russia would never have dared invade had Ukraine remained a nuclear power and lamented: “Our nuclear weapons were exchanged for nothing… We lost protection, our security guarantees. Those were our security guarantees.”
Ukraine should have demanded NATO membership in return for giving up its nuclear weapons at the time, Zelensky said.
The strident remarks demanding nuclear warheads as a NATO membership consolation prize are not by far the only time the Ukrainian leader has talked about acquiring the weapons in recent months. Indeed, in November, a reportedly leaked internal Ukrainian document postulated that even if the nation’s Western supporters didn’t want to share the technology with President Zelensky, Ukrainian scientists could easily build an indigenous nuclear weapon out of spent fuel rods from the nation’s considerable civil nuclear power fleet.
Last month, Zelensky said it was “absolutely stupid, illogical, and very irresponsible” to have given up its nuclear weapons, and that Ukraine would not be trusting of vague promises in future. He said then: “Almost everything depends on what we Ukrainians are able to secure to protect ourselves, because we will not make the mistakes of the past again”.
Meanwhile, Ukraine faces off against a very real nuclear power, and one which has not been shy about threatening to use its arsenal repeatedly since day one. Many of these threats have been against Ukraine’s international sponsors as a means to discourage their continued involvement in the conflict, and while the West has followed a general policy of slow-walking fresh tranches of support out of fear of ‘escalation’, the deterrent effect does not appear to have been particular pronounced so far.
