During the three-hour conversation released on Sunday, US podcaster Lex Fridman said he had a “dream” that the Ukrainian leader, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and US President-elect Donald Trump would all “get together in a room and make peace”.
His question about which security guarantees could satisfy both Ukraine and Russia prompted Zelensky to embark on a lengthy rant about how Western “partners” and “security guarantors” had betrayed Ukraine in the past.
“Ukraine had security guarantees. The Budapest Memorandum, nuclear weapons are the security guarantees that Ukraine had. Ukraine had nuclear weapons. I do not want to characterize it as good or bad. Today, the fact that we do not have them is bad,” Zelensky stated.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, around 1,700 nuclear warheads were left on the territory of Ukraine. While this stockpile technically made Ukraine the world’s third-largest nuclear power, the weapons themselves always remained under the operational control of Russia. The current government in Kiev has repeatedly claimed that Ukraine gave up “its” nuclear arsenal under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum in exchange for security assurances from Russia, the UK, and the US.
“The Budapest Memorandum, nuclear weapons, this is what we had. Ukraine used them for protection. This does not mean that someone attacked us. That doesn’t mean that we would have used it. We had that opportunity. These were our security guarantees,” Zelensky added.
The Ukrainian leader went on to criticize the US, UK, and other nuclear powers for ignoring Kiev’s repeated pleas to protect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.
“They didn’t give a f**k,” Zelensky said in Russian, despite actively avoiding speaking the language during the interview.
“Russia didn’t give a f**k, neither did all the other security guarantors… None of them gave a f**k about this country, these people, these security guarantees, etc.”
Zelensky has repeatedly accused Moscow of violating the Budapest Memorandum and expressed regret that his country surrendered its nuclear weapons, declaring in early 2022 – before Russia launched its offensive – that Kiev had “every right” to reverse the decision. In October, he stated that there are only two options to ensure Ukraine’s security: join NATO or obtain nuclear weapons.
Russia has argued that Ukraine never had any nuclear weapons to begin with, as the Soviet assets legally belonged to Moscow. Russian officials have also repeatedly stated that the 1994 document was undermined by NATO’s eastward expansion, which threatened Moscow’s vital security interests, and that it was the US that trampled it by sponsoring the Maidan coup in Kiev in 2014.
