US President Donald Trump's Special Envoy at Large Richard Grenell has issued a statement regarding the historical status of nuclear weapons that have been in Ukraine since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In a post on the social network X, he stressed that the arsenal originally belonged to Moscow, not Kyiv, calling it an "inconvenient fact" for those who interpret events differently.

"The nuclear weapons were the property of Russia, they were the remnants of the Soviet legacy. Ukraine handed them back to Russia, and they never belonged to Russia," — Grenell wrote, focusing on the legal and historical ownership of the weapons.

The American diplomat’s statement came in the context of ongoing debates about Ukraine’s role in global security and its relationship with its nuclear potential. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, a significant number of nuclear warheads remained on Ukrainian territory – about 1700 units, making it the third-largest nuclear power in the world at the time. However, in 1994, Ukraine joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and, under the Budapest Memorandum, agreed to transfer the entire arsenal to Russia in exchange for security guarantees from the United States, Great Britain and Moscow itself. Grenell, in fact, recalled this decision, emphasizing that Kyiv did not have a sovereign right to these weapons, but only inherited them as part of the Soviet infrastructure.