Donald Trump Envoy's Ukraine Nukes Comment Sparks Anger

U.S. President Donald Trump's envoy for special missions, Richard Grenell, sparked backlash after claiming nuclear weapons in Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union were "leftovers" returned to Moscow.

Why It Matters

Ukraine had a stockpile of nuclear weapons after the Soviet Union collapsed, at the time constituting the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal.

Then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, Russia's leader at the time, Boris Yeltsin, and the Ukrainian President, Leonid Kravchuk, inked what became known as the Trilateral Statement in January 1994. Under the agreement, Ukraine would transfer nuclear weapons stored in the country to Russia to be destroyed.

Russia, the U.S., and the United Kingdom then offered Ukraine a series of security "assurances" in exchange for removing these nuclear weapons from Ukrainian soil in the Budapest Memorandum later that year. Ukraine also signed up to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) as a non-nuclear state.

Russia violated the Budapest Memorandum when it launched operations against the Crimean peninsula in 2014, and when the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago. In December, Ukraine's foreign ministry marked 30 years since the memorandum was signed by calling it a "monument to short-sightedness in strategic security decision-making."

What To Know

Trump's envoy, Richard Grenell, said in a brief post to X on Tuesday that the nuclear weapons in Ukraine after the Soviet Union disintegrated "were Russia's and were leftovers."

Kyiv "gave the nukes back" to Moscow, Grenell said, adding: "They weren't Ukraine's. This is an uncomfortable fact."

Oleksandr Merezkho, the chair of Ukraine's parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee and a member of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's party, told Newsweek he was "shocked" by Trump's envoy's "totally wrong" statement.

The remarks were "totally disgraceful," Merezhko said. Ukraine, as a successor state to the crumbled USSR, was the legitimate owner of these weapons that were the only viable deterrent against Russian attacks, he added.

Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine under Clinton, said Trump's special envoy was "flat wrong," and nuclear warheads in Ukraine in the 1990s were "ex-Soviet, not Russian."

"Warheads in storage were in sole Ukrainian custody," he wrote in a social media post, adding intercontinental ballistic missiles and bomber aircraft inside the country were "eliminated," bar a handful that were sent to Russia.

Ukraine in the mid-1990s was in a "very vulnerable" position, risking becoming diplomatically isolated and pressured by Washington and Moscow, Merezhko said.

Clinton said in 2023 that he felt a "personal stake" in Ukraine's war with Russia because of his role in persuading Kyiv to surrender nuclear weapons.

"I knew that President Putin did not support the agreement President Yeltsin made never to interfere with Ukraine's territorial boundaries—an agreement he made because he wanted Ukraine to give up their nuclear weapons," Clinton said during an interview with Irish broadcaster RTÉ.

Kyiv was "afraid to give them up," the former president said, because of a belief that a nuclear stockpile was the "only thing" to offer protection from "an expansionist Russia."

"When it became convenient to him, President Putin broke it and first took Crimea," Clinton said.

Grenell's remarks come off the back of Trump's Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff — at the helm of ceasefire negotiations between Russia and Ukraine — appearing to confuse Ukrainian geography and saying Putin was not a "bad guy."

What People Are Saying

Grenell said the nuclear weapons stationed in Ukraine as the USSR broke up "were Russia's and were leftovers."

Anton Gerashchenko, a former adviser to Ukraine's interior ministry said: "Ukraine gave up our nuclear weapons in exchange for a commitment to protect us by Russia, United Kingdom and United States, not because they "were Russia's", of course."

What Happens Next

The future path of a U.S.-brokered ceasefire, which would likely hinge on U.S. security guarantees and pledges from Russia not to restart the war, remains unclear, with European officials and authorities in Kyiv watching on with trepidation.