Nuclear-Free Goal Unchanged, Ukraine Says

Promising again to dispose of all its nuclear arms, Ukraine sought Sunday to assuage the international concern caused when its president last week suspended the transfer of the weapons to Russia for their destruction.

Gen. Konstantin Morozov, the Ukrainian defense minister, said his country “is not changing its nuclear-free status” but believes another way will have to be found to achieve it because Russia lacks the facilities to destroy all the nuclear weapons inherited from the old Soviet Union.

What Ukraine wants, Morozov said in a television interview, is the “correction of the mechanism for the fulfillment of Ukraine’s program of nuclear arms reduction,” and Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk proposed new talks with Russia to ensure the weapons’ destruction under joint controls and called the suspension “temporary.”

Ukraine’s fear, Morozov explained, is that the weapons were simply being stockpiled in Russia, where security is not sufficient for the stored weapons and where the political situation remains unsettled.

“All this time, we have been analyzing the way (Russia) is fulfilling its commitment,” the Ukrainian defense minister said, “and it was difficult to obtain information that those nuclear warheads were really dismantled.

“Ukraine, which is advancing toward a nuclear-free status, is pursuing the goal of reducing nuclear potential, not moving it from one region to another, so that the lessening of nuclear confrontation in one region will not go together with the emergence of tension in some other.”

The issue is now certain to be taken up at the meeting of the leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, on Friday, reopening one of the fundamental agreements the leaders had reached at their first meeting in December.

In unilaterally suspending the transfer of Ukraine’s nuclear weapons, Kravchuk may have sought to underline his country’s sovereignty and independence from Russia or gain some leverage on Moscow. He may have been seeking some of the $400 million that the United States has allocated for the destruction of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. Or he may have been responding to the strong nationalist pressures on his government.

But he rang alarm bells in Moscow, throughout Europe and in Washington, for Ukraine appeared to be reneging on a series of crucial undertakings it had given its neighbors in the former Soviet Union, Europe and the world community as a whole.

The influential Moscow newspaper Izvestia said that Kravchuk’s move made Ukraine--which has already enlisted an army as large as that of Britain, France or Germany--the world’s sixth nuclear power, and another Russian commentator said: “Kravchuk must realize nuclear weapons are not toys.”

Within the Russian government, the Ukrainian announcement was taken as another direct challenge from Kravchuk to Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, who has been on vacation on the Black Sea for the past two weeks.

If Kiev were allowed to dictate the shape and character of the Commonwealth as well as the relations among its members, Yeltsin’s international stature would be diminished significantly; a confrontation, however, would also undermine international confidence in the organization, which groups 11 former Soviet republics.

“The leaders will have to have it out in Kiev,” one foreign policy analyst remarked. “The Commonwealth cannot survive such tensions. . . . Kravchuk was implicitly saying that Ukraine needed nuclear arms to defend itself against Russia, that in sending the tactical nuclear weapons to Russia it was arming a potential enemy.”

Ukraine drew some support over the weekend for its stand from neighboring Belarus, which also inherited Soviet nuclear weapons.

Col. Pyotr Chaus, the Belarussian defense minister, said that while Belarus will continue to transfer nuclear weapons to Russia for destruction, his government has not been told what is being done with them.

“Information about the place and method of their destruction is quite insufficient,” Chaus told the Belarus Telegraph Agency, and he called on the Kiev summit to discuss the matter fully.

Kravchuk himself now appears embarrassed by the storm of criticism he encountered, and over the weekend he issued a further statement affirming Ukraine’s desire to become a non-nuclear state. He said that Ukraine wants to meet its goal of removing all tactical nuclear weapons by July and all strategic nuclear arms by the end of 1994.

The point Kravchuk wanted to make at his press conference last Thursday, his office said, was his “doubt over whether tactical nuclear weapons that are being moved out are destroyed and (his) concern that this process is uncontrolled at present.”

Kravchuk implied in his weekend statement that once agreement is reached with Russia and the other Commonwealth members over joint control over dismantling the nuclear weapons and arrangements for their storage, Ukraine will resume their transfer.

Lt. Gen. Victor Samsonov, chief of staff of the Commonwealth’s military forces, had dismissed as impractical Kravchuk’s suggestion that a facility to dismantle nuclear weapons be built in Ukraine in the region affected by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident.

“In Russia, the technology for eliminating nuclear weapons has been well developed, and there are appropriate industrial facilities,” Samsonov told the Russian news agency ITAR-Tass. “It is not realistic to build a plant in Ukraine within the period mentioned by Kravchuk and especially to master this technology.”

Lt. Gen. Sergei A. Zelentsov, a top Commonwealth commander, said that his forces retain full control of Ukraine’s nuclear warheads, still estimated by military commentators here to number 4,356, and has no intention of turning them over to Ukrainian officials.

“Ukraine has no access to them, and we will see to it that the republic does not have access in the future,” Zelentsov told the Russian news agency. “We are doing this to prevent arms from getting in the hands of incompetent people and causing another Chernobyl.”