Putin says that if Ukraine got nuclear weapons, Russia would use all of its weapons

On Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that if Ukraine got nuclear weapons, Russia would use all of its weapons against it.

Some unnamed Western sources told the New York Times last week that U.S. President Joe Biden might give Ukraine nuclear weapons before he leaves office.

“What should we do if the country we are at war with now gets nuclear power?” In this situation, we will use all—I want to stress this—everything that Russia has that can be used to destroy it. Everything: we’re not going to let it happen. Putin told the press in Astana, Kazakhstan, “We’ll be watching their every move.”

“If officially someone were to transfer something, then that would mean a violation of all the non-proliferation commitments they have made,” said Putin.

Putin also said that Ukraine would almost certainly not be able to make a nuclear weapon, but that it might be able to make a “dirty bomb,” which is a regular bomb filled with toxic material to spread disease. He said that if that happened, Russia would react in the right way.

Russia has said over and over that Ukraine might use such a gadget without giving any proof.

Ukraine got nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union when it broke up in 1991, but they gave them up as part of the Budapest Memorandum in 1994 in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the US, and Great Britain.

Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the president of Ukraine, has said many times that the move made his country less safe and that this is why it should join NATO, which is something that Moscow strongly opposes.