BUDAPEST, November 27. /TASS/. The proposals for transferring nuclear weapons to Ukraine, voiced in the United States and other NATO countries, are no bluffing, but a reflection of the West's real plans against Russia, Endre Simo, the head of the non-governmental organization Hungarian Community for Peace said in response to a TASS question following a recent report by The New York Times that some officials in the United States and Western Europe were for returning to Kiev the nuclear weapons it gave up after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

"Vladimir Zelensky has repeatedly speculated that Ukraine might use nuclear weapons in an attempt to force Russia to pull back its troops to the 1991 border. NATO has been discussing not only the use of weapons of mass destruction in the context of Ukraine, but also how to militarily stop the decline of Western hegemony around the world. I believe that this should not be seen as bluffing. Russia may be considering ways of preventing the deployment of nuclear weapons in Ukraine," the expert said.

He also recalled that "a few days ago, Admiral Rob Bauer, the chairman of the NATO Military Committee, called for preventive strikes against Russian facilities." Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said about Bauer's words that "all decency has already been discarded and the true intentions [of the North Atlantic Alliance] are already being announced publicly."

Simo noted that Pete Hegseth, nominated to head the Pentagon by US President-elect Donald Trump, formulated some extremely worrisome ideas in his latest book entitled The War on Warriors. The nominee for the position of the US Secretary of Defense believes, among other things, that the US Armed Forces should ignore the Geneva conventions and any international laws governing the conduct of war. Instead, Hegseth suggested that the US should become a ruthless", "uncompromising" and "overwhelmingly lethal" force geared to "winning our wars according to our own rules," Simo recalled.

In his book, published in 2024, Hegseth discussed mainly US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the fight against Islamist terrorist groups (hence the book's title, The War on Warriors [of Islam]). But his advice to the US military is not focused entirely on this track of US policies.

On November 21, The New York Times reported that some officials in the United States and European countries suggested that Kiev be given back nuclear weapons, which Ukraine gave up after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the same time, the daily said that such a move was difficult to implement and might entail dire effects.