The chairman of the Russian State Duma Defense Committee Andrey Kartapolov told RIA Novosti in an interview Oct. 17 that Ukraine has no capacity to make nuclear weapons, despite claims to the contrary. Kartapolov was responding to Ukrainian President Zelenskyy’s claim that Ukraine might develop its own nuclear weapon and a separate report in German tabloid Bild Zeitung, which claimed Ukraine could produce a bomb in as little as a few weeks.
“This is complete nonsense, they have nothing for this. There are no competencies, no materials, no equipment. Fairy tales about creating nuclear weapons from waste for nuclear fuel are fairy tales for the poorly educated.... Real nuclear weapons are absolutely excluded. Iran has been trying to create them for so long. Despite having much greater competence, there is still no reliable data that it has created them or not. And Ukraine has not yet begun to do this, there is no one to do this,” Kartapolov said, according to a translation by Andrew Korybko.
