Ukraine ousted Khrushchev and became the Soviet leader from 1964 to 1982. Many prominent Soviet sports players, scientists, and artists came from Ukraine. On 26 April 1986, a reactor in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, resulting in the Chernobyl disaster, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history. This was the only accident to receive the highest possible rating of 7 by the International Nuclear Event Scale, indicating a "major accident", until the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in March 2011. At the time of the accident, 7 million people lived in the contaminated territories, including 2.2 million in Ukraine. After the
Nuclear weapons and Ukraine territorial integrity of Ukraine. Despite Russia's claimed annexation of Crimea, which the UN General Assembly rejected as invalid, the Government of Ukraine in 2014 reaffirmed its 1994 decision to accede to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear-weapon state. After the Ukrainian Parliament voted to remove President Viktor Yanukovych from office, a power vacuum formed, and Russia annexed Crimea. The Russian pretext used nationalist and cultural rhetoric, claiming that the Russian military was protecting ethnic Russians from attack in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. Russia's military actions violated the Budapest Memorandum. Pavlo Rizanenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament told "USA