Arms Control Wonk doesn’t always have a most amazing takes when it comes to world politics and tends to be very liberal, but they do know what they are talking about when it comes to nuclear arms and disarmament.
In this podcast episode they dispel the myth that Ukraine had nuclear weapons and gave them up. Quite a bit of detail on how these weapons were always in Russia’s control and Ukraine never had a serious option of taking control of them.
I think this is an important criticism, because the media consistently get this wrong such as in the following articles:
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/21/1082124528/ukraine-russia-putin-invasion
Three decades ago, the newly independent country of Ukraine was briefly the third-largest nuclear power in the world.
At the end of the Cold War, the third largest nuclear power on earth was not Britain, France or China. It was Ukraine. The Soviet collapse, a slow-motion downfall that culminated in December 1991, resulted in the newly independent Ukraine inheriting roughly 5,000 nuclear arms that Moscow had stationed on its soil. Underground silos on its military bases held long-range missiles that carried up to 10 thermonuclear warheads, each far stronger than the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. Only Russia and the United States had more weapons.