Putin: Russia will use all types of destruction means should Ukraine get nuclear bomb

If Ukraine acquires nuclear weapons, Russia will respond to this by all means that the country has at its disposal, Russian President Vladimir Putin said.

Photo: Flickr by Burnt Pineapple Productions, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

Nuclear explosion

Russia will use all available means of destruction should Ukraine acquire nuclear weapons, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a press conference in Kazakhstan.

According to him, in this case, "we will accept and use everything, I want to emphasize this, all means of destruction that Russia has at its disposal."

Moscow will not allow Ukraine to become a nuclear power, Putin added.

At the same time, Ukraine will not be able to develop nuclear weapons independently.

"This is practically impossible, everything has been lost there," he added. "Something dirty — as they say, a "dirty bomb", waste from nuclear power plants — this can be collected, of course," he said.

At the same time, the transfer of nuclear weapons to Ukraine by any other country would be a violation of obligations of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Putin added.

The Times earlier wrote that Ukraine could build a basic nuclear bomb in months. The publication referred to a document prepared for the Defense Ministry of Ukraine. Ukraine adheres to the provisions of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and does not intend to develop it, Ukraine's Foreign Ministry representative Georgy Tikhyi said.

"We do not possess, we do not develop, nor do we intend to create nuclear weapons," he said.

A number of US and EU officials admitted that US President Joe Biden could transfer nuclear weapons to Ukraine. Such reasoning is absolutely irresponsible and detached from reality, Kremlin's official spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in response.