Ukraine would like to have its nuclear weapons back

Ukraine

Had America and the Soviet Union ever fought the battle of Armageddon, it would have started from beneath a patch of muddy fields a few hours’ drive south of Kyiv. It’s here, in an underground base near the once-closed town of Pervomaisk, that Moscow housed eighty strategic nuclear missiles, all pointed at the US. Today it’s a museum, a dark tourism excursion, with a 120-foot long “Satan” missile on display. Satan carried ten warheads plus forty decoys and could have single-handedly flattened Britain. The only disappointment, for the Dr. Strangeloves among us, is the base’s “nuclear button” — not a red switch with a skull-and-crossbones, but a dull gray key on a VHS-style console marked “Start Up.” The really sobering detail, however, is that whoever had pressed it might not have been sober at all. According to our museum guide, Olena, the curators discovered a gallon of vodka stashed in the command center when they first took it over.

I’m in Ukraine to report on the invasion’s third anniversary, at a time when nuclear weapons are again a talking point. With Donald Trump cold-shouldering Ukraine, and NATO membership seemingly out the question, many Ukrainians think their only real guarantee of security is to become an “Israel-on-Dnieper” and acquire their own nuclear deterrent. Ukraine, after all, gave up its nukes in exchange for international security guarantees under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which Putin has flagrantly violated. President Zelensky has floated the idea of Ukraine having nuclear weapons again several times, and while it would violate Kyiv’s signing of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, few could argue that Ukraine wasn’t justified in wanting them. Former British prime minister Boris Johnson, whom I interview in Kyiv this week for the Telegraph, says Ukraine has a “moral case” for membership of the nuclear club.

Much of my interview with Johnson consists of him trying to convince Ukrainians not to take Trump’s rude comments about them at face value. He repeats the old mantra to judge Trump on his deeds, not his words, but while that might be possible in Washington, it’s not so easy here. A people who’ve lost 46,000 soldiers aren’t just going to roll their eyes and say: “Hey, that’s the Donald,” when told that the war was their fault, and that their elected leader is a dictator. It’s a grievous insult, one step off spitting on the war dead’s graves. Then again, if Trump’s judgement is that poor, perhaps it’s just as well he wants to shed the burden of leading the free world. As one Ukrainian points out, should tensions really flare between NATO and Moscow, as per Cuba 1962, would the West really feel confident in Trump as commander-in-chief?

I’ve been staying at the Hotel Ukraine, the 370-room Soviet behemoth on Kyiv’s Independence Square. I have a soft spot for these relics, some of which are so big that after communism’s collapse, they often scaled back to opening just a few floors (one often doubling as a brothel). Ahead of anniversary day on February 24, however, I move to a rented apartment instead. Too much risk of Putin sending a commemorative missile that day into Independence Square — or into the hotel, which itself is something of a landmark. These days, the Kremlin is fond of missiling anywhere that’s a known haunt of foreign journalists or aid workers. I know of six hotels and restaurants that have been hit, most recently the Hotel Bristol in Odesa, a beautiful old Victorian pile clobbered just last month. Another was the Ria Pizza restaurant in the Donbas town of Kramatorsk, where a missile killed thirteen including the Ukrainian novelist, Victoria Amelina. I was at the restaurant myself that night and was just browsing the menu when I got an unexpected phone call from a contact who wanted to meet straightaway on the other side of town. I left, quietly cursing fate for dragging me away from dinner, then heard the explosion twenty-eight minutes later.

My rented apartment is a first-floor period place with a wrought-iron balcony on a quiet, tree-lined boulevard downtown. There’s a nice neighborhood café nearby, and were I not paying only £20 per night, I could be in Marais in Paris. Indeed, central Kyiv today reminds me of what I imagine Paris might have been like in, say, the 1960s, before it got too expensive. It’s still a place where locals live, where a coffee or glass of wine is affordable, and where chains haven’t yet taken over. Once the war is over (and flights presumably resume) I’d recommend a visit. The city’s artier quarters also have an energy reminiscent of the old West Berlin — born, I think, of living on Europe’s geopolitical fault line. There’s hipster bars, galleries and clubs that are the match of anything in Brooklyn, taking advantage of an abundance of cheap, ex-Soviet buildings. One evening out here, for example, began at the rear service tunnel of an old 1960s office block. I thought Google Maps had sent me to the wrong location — then a door opened down to a beautiful basement speakeasy, complete with Chesterfields and a cocktail menu.

Bars and café are my workplaces here. It’s way too cold to vox pop people outside, and when interviewing soldiers, it’s often better to do it over a drink when they’re on R&R. One night I met “Jim,” an American military volunteer whom I’ve been in touch with since the start of the war. He’s lost so many comrades that nowadays he avoids becoming too friendly with fellow soldiers. Camaraderie one day, he explains, can mean grief the next. Like most of the US volunteers here, he’s appalled at the “Orange Clown” in the White House and says that most soldiers will fight on whether or not Trump pulls the weapons plug. If Russia prevails, Jim vows he’ll fight on as a partisan.

The foreign volunteers here are a mixed bag. Some, like Jim, are principled idealists, here to defend democracy. Others just see the ultimate test of combat mettle, a Fight Club on steroids. A few are utter fantasists, like a fellow American that Jim met last year named Ryan Routh. Routh boasted of contacts in high places and made grandiose talk of supplying Jim’s unit with high-quality drones, all of which came to nothing. The next time Jim saw Routh was on the news last autumn, when he was arrested for attempting to assassinate Donald Trump at his golf course in Florida. Quite a few volunteers wish Routh had succeeded.

Routh was so unhinged that even Ukraine’s International Legion, which has a few cranks in its ranks, refused to have him. Yet he’s still left his mark here. After the legion turned him down, he hung around in Independence Square, where he appears to have started the informal “flag garden,” which commemorates the fallen. It’s a patch of lawn where anyone who’s lost a loved one plants a small Ukrainian flag in their memory and is now the main unofficial memorial to the dead, with tens of thousands of flags. Indeed, should Trump ever visit Kyiv officially, he may well see it. Hopefully he’ll be too busy forging business deals to ask whose idea it was.