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

[DetroitLegalBeagle]

14. The weapons would be useless by now

Without regular maintenance, those warheads would be little more than material for dirty bombs. They wouldn't work. Tritium has a half life of a little over 12 years. Electronics, the conventional explosives, and other materials all degrade from the constant exposure to radiation and need to be replaced. The cores themselves, while stable enough to last decades or longer, have corrosion issues and periodically need to be remachined to clean it up. Ukraine did not have the skills or facilities to maintain them. Nor could they have developed those skills quickly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Things were fairly chaotic, corruption was(arguably still) rampant, and they had bigger problems to deal with then trying to maintain security on a bunch of weapons they lacked the skill and operational control over. Which comes to another problem, they had no control of the weapons. They were physically located in Ukrainian territory but under Russian control.