US will not return nuclear weapons to Ukraine that it renounced after the collapse of the USSR

(Patria) - The US is not considering the possibility of returning nuclear weapons to Ukraine, which the country renounced after the collapse of the Soviet Union, White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said yesterday.

Sullivan stated this in response to a question about an article published last month in the New York Times, which stated that some anonymous Western officials said that US President Joe Biden could provide Ukraine with weapons before leaving office.

- No, that issue is not being considered. We are now working on increasing various conventional capabilities for Ukraine so that its army can effectively defend itself and fight the Russians. And that does not include nuclear capabilities - Sullivan told ABC.

Last week, Russia announced that such an idea was "absolute madness" and that preventing such a scenario was one of the reasons why Moscow sent troops to Ukraine.

Kyiv inherited nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union after its collapse in 1991, but renounced them in accordance with the 1994 agreement, the Budapest Memorandum, in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the US, and Great Britain.