National security adviser Jake Sullivan told ABC News on Sunday morning that the Biden administration is not considering returning nuclear weapons to Ukraine.
With only seven weeks until President Joe Biden leaves office, his administration has been working to get more weapons to Ukraine and forgive billions in loans given to the war-torn country as it prepares for its third winter of war with Russia.
The Associated Press (AP) reported, citing two unnamed U.S. officials, on November 19 that the U.S. will send Ukraine at least $275 million in new weapons. Meanwhile, on November 20, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said that the administration has taken steps to forgive roughly $4.7 billion in U.S. loans given to Ukraine.
Biden has been a critical ally to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With President-elect Donald Trump soon entering the White House, the fate of U.S. support for Ukraine in the war is unclear.
Trump has criticized the billions of dollars in military aid that the Biden administration has given Ukraine. Meanwhile, the president-elect has said that if he were at the negotiating table with Putin and Zelensky, the war between the two nations would end “within 24 hours,” leading to concerns that he would press Zelensky to surrender the territory that Russia currently occupies.
Despite everything the Biden administration is doing to help Ukraine before Trump’s incoming administration takes over, it does not plan on taking such a drastic action as returning nuclear weapons to Ukraine, according to Sullivan.
During Sullivan’s Sunday morning appearance on ABC News’ This Week, co-host Jonathan Karl mentioned a recent report published by The New York Times that read, “Several officials even suggested that Mr. Biden could allow Ukraine to have nuclear weapons again, as it did before the fall of the Soviet Union. That would be an instant and enormous deterrent. But such a step would be complicated and have serious implications.”
“Is that something that is under consideration? That the U.S. would return nuclear weapons to Ukraine,” Karl asked Sullivan.
Sullivan responded: “That is not under consideration. No. What we are doing is surging various conventional capacities to Ukraine, so that they could effectively defend themselves and take the fight to the Russians. Not nuclear capability.”
Newsweek reached out to Ukraine’s foreign affairs ministry via email and the Russian government via online form for comment late Sunday morning.
Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994 as part of the Budapest Memorandum. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, thousands of nuclear arms were abandoned in Ukraine, leaving Kyiv at the time with the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world. The Budapest Memorandum affirmed Ukraine’s security and sovereignty in exchange for giving up the nuclear stocks.
Russia, which inherited the Soviet Union’s nuclear warheads, has the largest nuclear weapons stockpile in the world. According to a March 2024 report by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Moscow has a total of about 5,580 nuclear warheads. Of the total inventory, about 1,710 strategic warheads are deployed, about 1,112 strategic warheads and about 1,558 nonstrategic warheads are in storage and about 1,200 warheads are retired but still largely intact, awaiting dismantlement.
Meanwhile, Putin approved record-high military spending for next year. The AP reported Sunday that roughly 32.5 percent of the Kremlin’s budget posted on a government website has been allocated for national defense, up from a reported 28.3 percent this year. Russia’s national defense spending for 2025 amounts to over $145 billion, according to the AP.
The Russian leader also recently updated Russia’s nuclear doctrine, lowering the threshold for Moscow to use its nuclear weapons stockpile. The new doctrine allows for a potential nuclear response by Russia even to a conventional attack by any country that is supported by a nuclear power.
Putin approved the nuclear weapons update days after Biden authorized Ukraine to use U.S.-supplied missiles deeper inside Russia, granting a months-long request from Zelensky. The decision to allow Ukraine to use the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMs) farther into Russian territory came amid the deployment of North Korean troops in Russia.
