White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on Sunday that the United States is not considering returning nuclear weapons that it gave up after the collapse of the Soviet Union to Ukraine.
Sullivan made his comments when asked about a New York Times article published last month that said some unnamed Western officials suggested that US President Joe Biden could give Ukraine weapons before he leaves office.
“That's not under consideration, no. What we're doing is strengthening Ukraine's various conventional capabilities so they can effectively defend themselves and take the fight to the Russians, not[give them]a nuclear capability,” he told ABC.
Russia said last week that the idea was “absolute madness” and that preventing such a scenario was one of the reasons that prompted Moscow to send troops to Ukraine.
Kiev inherited nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union after its collapse in 1991 but gave them up under a 1994 agreement, the Budapest Memorandum, in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the United States and Britain.
