The following is an excerpt from a May 31st article The Secret Ukrainian Military Programs that was posted on Voltairenet.org by Thierry Meyssan. You can read the entire article at the link at the bottom of this post . . . SC

By Thierry Meyssan - May 31, 2022

[SNIP]

UKRAINE’S MILITARY NUCLEAR PROGRAM

Let’s come to the most problematic part of the story, because it is even more serious. Upon independence, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine inherited much of the Soviet nuclear weapons system. These three new states signed the Budapest Memorandum in 1994 with the United States, Russia and the United Kingdom. The Big Three pledged to secure their borders, while the small three pledged to transfer all their nuclear weapons to Russia and to abide by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

This memorandum is often referred to by those who want to emphasize the duplicity of Russia, which, after signing it, violated it. This is not true, since the memorandum provides that each of the Big Three will be relieved of its promise of non-intervention in case of "self-defence or in any other manner consistent with the provisions of the United Nations Charter". Yet, Russia officially recognized the Donbass republics after the Ukrainian state refused to honour its signature of the Minsk Agreements and its army shelled the Donbass for 8 years.

Between 2014 and 2022, Ukraine asked four times for a renegotiation of the Budapest Memorandum. Finally, President Volodymyr Zelensky said at the annual meeting of the Munich Security Conference on February 19, 2022: "I, as president, will do it for the first time. But Ukraine and I are doing it for the last time. I am launching consultations within the framework of the Budapest Memorandum. The Minister of Foreign Affairs has been asked to convene them. If they do not happen again or if their results do not guarantee the security of our country, Ukraine will have the right to think that the Budapest Memorandum is not working and that all the comprehensive decisions of 1994 are being questioned" [11].

Questioning "all the global decisions of 1994" cannot mean anything other than taking back nuclear weapons. Therefore, President Zelensky’s position can be summarized as follows: let us suppress the Donbass separatists or we will restore our military nuclear program. It should be noted that the main leaders of the Atlantic Alliance were present or represented in the room. Yet none of them protested the announcement of a violation of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

Commenting on the speech, Russian President Vladimir Putin said, "The only thing [Ukraine] lacks is a uranium enrichment system. But this is a technical issue, and for Ukraine it is not an insoluble problem.”

Russian intelligence services were informed that Ukraine had a nuclear military program. We don’t know how much they knew about that program.

Laurence Norman, the Wall Street Journal’s special envoy to the Davos forum on Iran’s nuclear program, reported Rafael Grossi’s statement on Ukraine’s nuclear program on Twitter, but did not publish an article about it. The information was confirmed by another journalist, this time from the New York Times, also on Twitter.

Rafael Grossi of Argentina, who heads the International Atomic Energy Agency, incidentally said at the Davos Forum on May 25 that Ukraine had stored 30 tons of plutonium and 40 tons of enriched uranium at its Zaporizhia plant and that his agency was wondering what had happened to them.

Moreover, the Zaporizhia plant was one of the targets of the Russian army, which took it over on the second day of its special operation, February 26. A fire was set in an adjacent laboratory during a Russian-Ukrainian clash on March 4. At the time, the irresponsibility of the Russian army was denounced. Obviously, it was something else, as Moscow stated. Russia had started to transfer the fuel and Ukrainian special forces tried to stop them.

Plutonium is sold for $5,000 to $11,000 per gram. 30 tons purchased at cost is worth $150 billion. The price of uranium depends on its degree of enrichment. At less than 5%, it can only be used for civilian purposes and must reach at least 80% for military use. Without knowing the degree of enrichment, the price cannot be evaluated. The seizure by Russia of this undeclared stockpile probably repays all the sanctions imposed on them.

The information we have raises several questions: since when has Ukraine, which had given up all its Soviet-era stocks to Russia, been holding these materials? Where did they come from and who paid for them? Alternatively, what is the enrichment level of the uranium and who enriched it?
To these questions, the Russian press adds another: how reliable is the International Atomic Energy Agency, which kept this information secret until last week?

In view of these elements, it is appropriate to revise the common accusation according to which Russia is responsible for this war.