Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte (Left) speaks with Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Andriy Yermak (Right).
Credit: Reuters Photo
Brussels: Ukraine is not considering developing nuclear weapons and recent reports on the topic were driven by an incorrect interpretation of remarks by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, his chief of staff said on Friday.
"We have not these thoughts about nuclear, we refuse it," Andriy Yermak told a think-tank event in Brussels.
The reports came after Zelenskyy gave his account on Thursday of a meeting he had in September with US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in New York, in which he made the case for Ukraine to join NATO.
Zelenskyy said he spoke with Trump about Ukraine's negative experience with the Budapest Memorandum, a 1994 deal that gave Ukraine security "assurances" from Britain, Russia and the United States in return for relinquishing the nuclear weapons it had inherited with the break-up of the Soviet Union.
"I told him: What is the way out – either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons, and then this is defence for us, or we should have some kind of an alliance," the Ukrainian leader told reporters at a European Union summit in Brussels.
But Zelenskyy also declared: "We are not choosing nuclear weapons, we are choosing NATO."