Former U.S. President Bill Clinton said that since 2011 he had allowed the possibility of Russia launching a military operation in Ukraine. According to him, he made such conclusions after a meeting with President Vladimir Putin, held in Davos, Switzerland 12 years ago.
“Vladimir Putin told me in 2011, three years before he took Crimea, that he did not agree with the agreement that I made with Boris Yeltsin,” Mr. Clinton said, speaking at the 92NY cultural center in New York (quote By Financial Times).
Bill Clinton clarified that in his conversation with Vladimir Putin it was about the Budapest Memorandum signed in 1994, which implies Ukraine’s renunciation of nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees. The former US president claims that the Russian leader made it clear during the conversation that he does not consider this agreement important and is not going to adhere to it.
“He said that he does not support this agreement and is not bound by it,” Mr. Clinton added. He stressed that “from that day on I knew” that the forthcoming entry of Russian troops into Ukraine was “only a matter of time.”
Earlier, Bill Clinton, in an interview with RTE, said he regrets his role in persuading Ukraine to give up nuclear weapons in 1994. In his opinion, if Kyiv now had a nuclear deterrence force, Russia would not have started an armed conflict.
On January 14, 1994, the presidents of Russia, the United States, and Ukraine, Boris Yeltsin, Bill Clinton, and Leonid Kravchuk, signed a tripartite statement reaffirming Kiev’s readiness to deactivate nuclear weapons that have been on Ukrainian territory since Soviet times. On December 5 of the same year, the leaders of Russia, the United States, Ukraine and Great Britain signed a memorandum in Budapest, according to which the Russian Federation committed itself to respecting the independence, sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine. Kyiv, in turn, pledged to transfer the remaining nuclear weapons to Russia.
What happens on the 436th day after the entry of Russian troops into Ukraine – in the online broadcast “Kommersant”.
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