Ukraine not considering nuclear arms, top official Yermak says

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Ukraine is not considering developing nuclear weapons and recent reports on the topic were driven by an incorrect interpretation of remarks by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, his chief of staff said on Friday.

"We have not these thoughts about nuclear, we refuse it," Andriy Yermak told a think-tank event in Brussels.

The reports came after Zelenskiy gave his account on Thursday of a meeting he had in September with U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in New York, in which he made the case for Ukraine to join NATO.

Zelenskiy said he spoke with Trump about Ukraine's negative experience with the Budapest Memorandum, a 1994 deal that gave Ukraine security "assurances" from Britain, Russia and the United States in return for relinquishing the nuclear weapons it had inherited with the break-up of the Soviet Union.

"I told him: What is the way out – either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons, and then this is defence for us, or we should have some kind of an alliance," the Ukrainian leader told reporters at a European Union summit in Brussels.

But Zelenskiy also declared: "We are not choosing nuclear weapons, we are choosing NATO."

(Reporting by Andrew Gray and Lili Bayer, Editing by Charlotte Van Campenhout and Alex Richardson)

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