Colonel of the KGB reserve, ex-intelligence officer, political scientist and publicist Sergey Zhirnov, in an interview with Unian, commented on the Putin's proposal to return nuclear weapons to the territory of Belarus.

"When the USSR collapsed, there were four Soviet republics - Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. According to the Budapest Memorandum, three of them (Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Belarus) renounced their nuclear weapons and carriers, transferring them to the Russian Federation under the security guarantees of Russia, the USA and Great Britain. In this sense, everything is very logical. But when Lukashenko and Putin started talking about the return of nuclear weapons to the territory of Belarus, this is a violation of the memorandum. It is also a violation of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. They are trying to pretend that Belarus was a nuclear power and there is no spread here.

If Belarus does this, then Ukraine should also be told: "Return our nuclear weapons to us, and if you do not return them to us, then, since you nullified the Budapest Memorandum, we have the official right to renew it ourselves." You have all the potential, nuclear fuel, and stations where uranium can be enriched. There is an enterprise in Dnipro that makes nuclear weapons carriers. Ukraine can very quickly become a nuclear state in five years.

This is international law. If they cancel the international document, all Ukrainian rights of 1994 will return to Ukraine."