I wonder if Ukraine still had their nuclear weapons, if any of this horror would have happened?

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. A counterfactual with them keeping nukes in the 90s gets complicated

How much would they have had to spend to maintain them? What credible delivery system did they have, and how defensible was it against attack? What if a pro-Russia president, like Yanukovych, gave them to Russia anyway? What if him being in control of nukes had deterred the Maidan Revolution, or created a Ukrainian military that stuck with the president on the grounds that a coup in a nuclear-armed country is a bad thing?

The Pope had been doing OK, but seems to be trying to be neutral now:

Pope Francis has offered no shortage of kind words for the beleaguered people of Ukraine. He has decried the “cruel and senseless” war inflicted on them, blamed the invasion on an unnamed “potentate” and prayed for peace.
...
Francis’s relationship with Ukrainians was “shaken to its core” in particular by the Vatican’s Way of the Cross procession through Rome’s Colosseum on Good Friday, say critics.

The Church had a Ukrainian and a Russian woman hold the cross during the procession, accompanied by a text that stressed peace and reconciliation between peoples — but made no mention of who had started the war and prosecuted it so brutally.
...
Then, on the same day, the Vatican’s Kyiv ambassador and a cardinal from Poland met with the main Ukrainian leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, which has acted as sort of a spiritual cheerleader for the invasion.

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/why-the-popes-gesture-of-ukraine-russia-reconciliation-has-angered-many-followers