Kyiv has made a rapid accession to the military alliance a key point of its Victory Plan, which Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been presenting to NATO leaders, but has grown frustrated with their prevarication.
NATO leaders have spoken of Ukraine joining the alliance, but only at an unspecified date.
“Either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons, and that will be our protection, or we should have some sort of alliance. Apart from NATO, today we do not know any effective alliances,” Zelenskyy said at a European Council summit in Brussels on Thursday.
However, during a press conference with Mark Rutte, NATO’s Secretary General, he later clarified that “we never spoke that we are preparing to build a nuclear weapon or something like this.”
“What I meant is that today there is no stronger security guarantee for us besides NATO membership.”
While Russia has frequently rattled the nuclear saber, suggesting it would consider using atomic weapons against Ukraine, Zelenskyy’s comments at Thursday’s meeting were the first time he raised the prospect of Kyiv developing similar capabilities.
The German tabloid newspaper Bild recently cited a Ukrainian official specializing in weapons procurement as saying that Kyiv could build a nuclear bomb within weeks.
“We have the material; we have the knowledge. If the order is given, we will only need a few weeks to have the first bomb,” the unnamed official was quoted as saying.
Kyiv pours cold water over claims
But the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry dismissed the report.
Ministry spokesman Heorhii Tykhyi said Kyiv "remains a committed party" to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Ukraine agreed to dismantle its nuclear weapons in return for security guarantees from the U.S., Britain and Russia.
Kyiv inherited an estimated several thousand atomic warheads when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991 but surrendered them three years later.
Some analysts have said that even if Ukraine had a nuclear weapon, it was unlikely to prove an effective deterrent.
Pavel Podvig, a researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Studies, was cited by Britain’s The Telegraph newspaper as saying that a nuclear-armed Ukraine would merely increase the danger of a nuclear conflict.
After pitching his "victory plan" for ending the war with Russia to the European Union and NATO on Thursday, Zelenskyy received pledges of continued support but no endorsement from key allies of his call for an immediate invitation to join the military alliance.
