Ukraine May Have Already Reacquired Nuclear Weapons, Polish General Says

• Ukraine May Have Already Reacquired Nuclear Weapons, Polish General Says
  by Ilya Tsukanov, https://sputniknews.com/
  Ukraine handed over the last of its Soviet-era nuclear weapons to Russia in the mid-1990s after signing an agreement on security guarantees with Moscow and Washington. Last year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned Kiev might revoke its non-nuclear weapons status due to “Russian aggression.”
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  Owing to its large-scale nuclear potential, Ukraine may have already built a nuclear bomb, Polish General Waldemar Skrzypczak suspects. “I do not rule out Ukraine having nuclear weapons, because the Ukrainians have nuclear power plants, scientists, laboratories and knowhow. In other words, everything they need to possess such a weapon. In fact, today no one is in a position to prohibit the Ukrainians from having it,” Skrzypczak, the former commander of Poland’s Land Forces, said in an interview with Polish media.
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  Last October, Russian Radiation, Chemical and Biological Troops chief Igor Kirillov said that Kiev has the technological potential and industrial base to build a radioactive dirty bomb, including over 1,500 tons of spent fuel from nuclear power plants, a uranium ore mining plant, and research centers in Kharkov and Kiev that proved instrumental in Soviet-era nuclear research.
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  Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu contacted his US, French, British, and Turkish counterparts the same month to convey Moscow’s concerns about Kiev’s potential employment of a dirty bomb to accuse Russia of a provocation. Ukrainian officials denied that the country possesses or plans to acquire such weapons, and emphasized Kiev’s strict adherence to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
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  However, last week, Ukrainian Ambassador to Germany Oleksiy Makeev announced Kiev’s desire to “begin a discussion” on the country’s nuclear status, saying that the 1994 Budapest Memorandum security agreement which led Ukraine to give up nukes proved a “bad signal for all countries in the world which realized that only nuclear weapons could save them” from an “aggressor” like Russia.
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