Previous Subchapter → 6.1 Is Russia’s war legal
The next argument Scott Ritter brings up in his legal defence of the Russian government is this:
So, Ritter claims that Ukraine’s President Zelensky talked about Ukraine building nuclear weapons at the Munich Security Conference, and mentions that Ukraine has the material to build these weapons because of fuel rods at Ukrainian nuclear plants, justifying Russia’s war as a way of preventing Ukraine from making nuclear weapons and using them on Russian soil.
The small problem with this claim is that we can easily scrutinise it, because a transcript of Zelensky’s speech at that event is publicly available, in the transcript of the speech the word “nuclear” is only mentioned once, in this context:
I want to believe that the North Atlantic Treaty and Article 5 will be more effective than the Budapest Memorandum.
Ukraine has received security guarantees for abandoning the world’s third nuclear capability. We don’t have that weapon. We also have no security. We also do not have part of the territory of our state that is larger in area than Switzerland, the Netherlands or Belgium. And most importantly - we don’t have millions of our citizens. We don’t have all this.
Therefore, we have something. The right to demand a shift from a policy of appeasement to ensuring security and peace guarantees.
Since 2014, Ukraine has tried three times to convene consultations with the guarantor states of the Budapest Memorandum. Three times without success. Today Ukraine will do it for the fourth time. I, as President, will do this for the first time. But both Ukraine and I are doing this for the last time. I am initiating consultations in the framework of the Budapest Memorandum. The Minister of Foreign Affairs was commissioned to convene them. If they do not happen again or their results do not guarantee security for our country, Ukraine will have every right to believe that the Budapest Memorandum is not working and all the package decisions of 1994 are in doubt.”
What Ritter claimed Zelensky’s speech said, was that:
We need to get out of the non proliferation treaty and acquire nuclear weapons!
However looking at the speech we can see that the non proliferation treaty, the “Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons”, is not mentioned at all; What Zelensky does talk about is the Budapest Memorandum.
You see, when Ukraine became an independent country as the Soviet Union ceased to exist, it inherited a portion of the Soviet Union’s stash of over 40,000 nuclear weapons, leaving it with an arsenal of about 1,700 nukes, one of the biggest stockpiles in the world.
But shortly after becoming independent Ukraine gave up this arsenal and joined the Non Proliferation Treaty, which banned it from building a nuclear arsenal or trying to acquire one.
To support this, the Ukrainians signed up to the “Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances” along with Russia, the USA and UK, this memorandum was an agreement between these countries to do 6 things:
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Respect Ukraine’s independence and existing borders
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Refrain from threatening force or using force against Ukraine, except in self defence
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Refrain from economic coercion that would subordinate Ukraine to another country, or threaten Ukraine’s independence
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Agree to provide assistance to Ukraine if Ukraine is attacked with nuclear weapons, or threatened with an attack by nuclear weapons
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Agree not to use nuclear weapons against any country that is part of the Non Proliferation treaty, including Ukraine, unless they are attacked by a nuclear weapons state, or a country allied to a nuclear weapons state
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Consult if a situation arises which calls into question the previous commitments
These were guarantees that Ukraine received in exchange for giving up its nuclear arsenal and joining the Non Proliferation Treaty, what Zelensky said in his speech is that this agreement wasn’t working, and that if it continued to fail to provide security to Ukraine it would become a worthless scrap of paper.
Given that Russia has broken every single point of this agreement except the fifth one, what he was saying wasn’t just an opinion, it was a statement of fact: Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for receiving guarantees, and these guarantees turned out to be empty promises.
As for Ritter’s point about material in Ukrainian plants being something the Ukrainians could pack along with explosives to build a “dirty bomb”, a kind of radioactive weapon, any nuclear plant in any country will obviously contain radioactive material, and some of that could theoretically go towards building radioactive military weapons, over 30 countries in the world have nuclear power plants, if having nuclear material alone justifies war Russia should invade all of them so that they can’t become a threat, that would be more fair wouldn’t it?
As we can see, the more we try to follow this logic to its conclusion, the more insane it becomes. But that’s the thing, once again this isn’t a serious legal argument and isn’t really meant to make sense, which is why the person making it and his host burst out laughing while talking about it.
This once again is pointing out another hypocrisy. The USA invaded Iraq on the basis of non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction, alongside a barrage of other dubious claims, so if Russia does the same thing to Ukraine it’s only fair, the US government are a bunch of hypocrites for complaining about it.
And again, yes, the US are hypocrites about this issue, but again, no, this doesn’t make Russia any more justified or legitimate in their actions.
Besides, when you’re a small country threatened by a superpower next door wanting to have the nuclear weapons isn’t some kind of evil or great shame, a topic we discussed at length in our documentary on North Korea, so even if the Ukrainians were guilty of this point Ritter levels at them, it wouldn’t make it any more justifiable for Russia to invade them.
I think, combined, we see that Russia has articulated a cognisable case […] It turns out that the Russians have a pretty sound case derived by fact.
Not really.
In conclusion: Fuck off, Ritter.