Ukraine Won’t Give Up Nuclear Arms

Signaling that his country is backing away from a key Soviet-American arms treaty, the new Ukrainian prime minister has announced that Ukraine is unwilling to destroy its missile silos or hand over all its long-range nuclear weapons to Russia.

“As for the strategic weapons, we cannot give them up,” Prime Minister Leonid Kuchma said Friday after a meeting with U.S. Ambassador Roman Popadiuk.

Kuchma cited economic reasons, explaining that Ukraine wants to use the uranium in the warheads to produce nuclear energy. He also said his government fears that destroying missile silos would damage large sections of farmland.

If Ukraine insists on renegotiating the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, it will mean the partial collapse of what President Bush counts as one of his main foreign policy achievements, the signing of the treaty last year.

START, signed by President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Moscow on July 31, 1991, was the first agreement to actually reduce each side’s vast nuclear arsenals. After the Soviet Union disintegrated in December, its four nuclear heirs--Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus--agreed to adhere to START in a pact signed in Lisbon in May.

Moreover, in what Bush counted as an important victory, the latter three also agreed to go far beyond START by giving up their nuclear weapons altogether “in the shortest possible time.”

However, not one of the three nations’ parliaments has ratified the Lisbon pact yet.

Debates in Kiev last week over a draft military doctrine revealed that a growing number of Ukrainian officials think that at least part of the country’s nuclear arsenal should be retained as a deterrent against Russia.

Those concerns are far from new. Since the nation gained independence last year, Ukrainian officials have voiced fears about relinquishing the nuclear arsenal they inherited from the former Soviet Union without security guarantees.

Recent developments in Russia have given new impetus to security issues. The growing challenge to Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin is viewed with rising alarm here.

In a joint interview broadcast on Ukrainian television after his meeting with the American ambassador, Kuchma did not go so far as to renege on Ukraine’s disarmament pledges, but he did explain that fulfilling them will require “billions of dollars that Ukraine does not have.”

In an apparent rebuke to the United States, Kuchma added: “It is one thing to come here, remove the (nuclear) weapons and leave,” but paying for it is a different matter.

Popadiuk did not publicly respond to the prime minister’s complaints, and Bush Administration officials in Washington declined to comment Saturday.

Ukraine has reportedly been under pressure from Washington and Moscow to hand its strategic nuclear warheads to Russia, the only former Soviet republic that is to remain a nuclear power.

Kuchma, a former director of the world’s largest missile factory, in Dnepropetrovsk, said Ukraine gave about 2,000 tactical nuclear warheads to Russia last year but received nothing in return.

Times staff writer Robin Wright, in Washington, contributed to this report.