“Madmen”: Russia comments on Ukraine’s nuclear weapons creation
18 October 2024 18:36
The Kremlin has reacted to information that Ukraine may start producing its own nuclear weapons. The statement was made by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, "Komersant Ukrainian" reports, citing the Russian media.
“They are crazy. They will never succeed,” Lavrov said.
He also voiced Russia’s conditions under which it is allegedly ready to stop hostilities in Ukraine. These are the refusal to join NATO, neutral status and the restoration of the rights of the “Russian population”.
It is worth noting that Lavrov is not the first Russian official to make a statement about Ukraine’s possible resumption of nuclear power status and the creation of a nuclear bomb. A day earlier, on 17 October, the head of the State Duma Defence Committee, Andrei Kartapolov , repeated the Russian propagandists’ thesis that Ukraine can only build a “dirty” nuclear bomb. But Russia is allegedly monitoring and controlling the situation.
“This is complete nonsense, they have nothing to do with it. There are no competences, no materials, no equipment. Fairy tales that you can create a nuclear weapon from nuclear fuel waste are fairy tales for the uneducated… Real nuclear weapons are absolutely excluded,” Kartapalov said.
What preceded it
on 17 October, BILD’s open data analyst Julian Röpke, who recently visited Ukraine, wrote that a few months ago, a senior Ukrainian official told the media and other members of a narrow circle of politicians and officials that Ukraine would not accept a second Russian military offensive against Kyiv. In this case, Ukraine’s nuclear arsenal, which the country voluntarily abandoned in the 1990s, would be restored.
“We have the materials, we have the knowledge. If the order is given, it will take us only a few weeks to get the first bomb. The West should think less about Russia’s red lines and much more about our red lines,” BILD quoted a Ukrainian official involved in arms supplies as saying on condition of anonymity.
In turn, Dmytro Lytvyn , an adviser to the Presidential Office, called BILD’s loud statement about nuclear weapons in Ukraine in two weeks “nonsense”.
According to Dmytro Lytvyn, it has long been possible to confuse the words of Bild military observer Julian Röpke with the statements of Russian propagandists. This is because both Röpke and Russian propaganda “throw the same nonsense into the information space”.
