KYIV, November 5 – Ukraine will start dismantling hundreds of missiles and dozens of strategic bombers this month as part of a U.S.-funded disarmament program, an official said Monday.
The first of some 225 Kh-22 air-to-surface missiles are slated to be destroyed at the Ozerne military airfield in the central Zhytomyr region on Wednesday. Destruction of Ukraine’s 31 Tu-22 strategic bombers will start Nov. 12 in the eastern city of Poltava, said Defense Ministry spokesman Oleh Mykhalko.
A total of 30 Kh-22s and six Tu-22s are expected to be dismantled by the end of 2002, said Ihor Mitiayev, who heads the ministry’s arms elimination program, according to the Interfax news agency. The weapons will be destroyed under a US$15 million program funded by the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, under a 1993 agreement between Ukraine and the United States to eliminate the former Soviet republic’s strategic nuclear arms and bombers.
Ukraine inherited the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, including hundreds of missiles and dozens of strategic bombers. In 1996, Ukraine renounced nuclear weapons and transferred all its 1,300 nuclear warheads to Russia for destruction.
