Russian and Ukrainian Defense Ministry officials have emphatically denied renewed allegations that 250 nuclear warheads reported as transferred from Ukraine to Russia in the early 1990s are, in fact, missing. The allegations, which received little press attention until early April 2006, first surfaced in December 2005, as part of a report by a special commission established by the Verkhovna Rada (the Ukrainian parliament) to investigate allegations of illicit arms trade. The allegedly missing weapons were said to have a combined yield of 20 megatons (millions of tons of TNT). [1]

The charge that the nuclear weapons were missing was made by Sergey Sinchenko, a legislator from the Bloc of Yulia Timoshenko (one of Ukrainian reformist parties), as he announced the special commission’s findings in December. He explained that the commission had uncovered the 250-weapon discrepancy when it compared Ukrainian documentation on the number of warheads transferred to Russia with Russian documentation on the number of warheads received from Ukraine. (In 1992-1996, Ukraine transferred to Russia all nuclear warheads that remained in its territory after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The transfer of tactical warheads was completed in 1992 and strategic warheads in 1996).

As the Russian press began to focus on the allegation in April, some observers went so far as to speculate that Ukraine might have sold these warheads to Iran, a sale that would have been a part of Ukraine’s widespread illegal arm sales during the tenure of President Leonid Kuchma that included sales of such advanced weapons as Soviet Kh-55 air-launched cruise missiles to Iran and China. [2] Representatives of the Ukrainian and Russian Ministries of Defense have resolutely denied the charges. Chief of the General Staff of Ukraine Col.-Gen. Sergey Kirichenko declared that Ukraine had delivered to Russia all nuclear warheads that had been located in its territory and that their transfer was thoroughly documented. [3] Similarly, Russia’s Chief of the General Staff Yuri Baluevski said he refused to comment on “reports that lacked any foundation whatsoever.” [4]

Retired general Yevgeni Maslin, who headed Russia’s 12th GUMO (the department of the Russian Ministry of Defense in charge of all nuclear weapons) at the time when nuclear weapons were transferred from Ukraine to Russia, called the reports of missing weapons “nonsense” and “sensationalism.” Every single warhead was withdrawn, the newspaper quoted Maslin as saying, and “every warhead was thoroughly documented and accounted for.” [5]

Indeed, Sinchenko’s allegations appear difficult to credit. The Russian Ministry of Defense or, more specifically, the 12th GUMO, would unquestionabaly have had full data on the number and types of nuclear warheads located in Ukraine prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union, and consequently any discrepancy between the number of warheads subsequently delivered by Ukraine and the pre-existing data on the Russian side would have been immediately detected. Thus any deliberate attempt to divert the weapons to a foreign state would have required collusion between both Russian and Ukrainian authorities and the conspiracy would have had to remain secret for many years, a situation that is difficult to imagine.

This is not the first time information about “lost” Ukrainian nuclear warheads has surfaced. In 2002, the leader of the Ukrainian Communist party, Petr Simonenko, claimed that 200 nuclear warheads had been unaccounted for during the transfer of weapons from Ukraine to Russia. He also alluded to a “double accounting” scheme, which was used to hide the discrepancy between the reported and the actually delivered number of warheads. [6] In 1996 similar allegations were made by retired general Aleksandr Lebed, Secretary of the Security Council of Russia at that time, who said that about 150 tactical nuclear warheads had been “lost” during the withdrawal of nuclear weapons from post-Soviet states to Russia. Subsequent investigations did not support that claim. [7]

Nikolai Sokov, Monterey Institute Center for Nonproliferation Studies