Former US President Bill Clinton expressed regret that in 1994 he persuaded Ukraine to give up nuclear weapons. It is reported by RBC.
In his opinion, if Kyiv had the forces of deterrence, then the Russian special operation “could have been avoided.”
“I feel personally responsible because I got them to agree to give up their nuclear weapons. And none of them believe that Russia would pull off this trick if Ukraine still had their weapons,” he said, stressing that he “feels terrible about it.”
In 1994, Clinton signed a tripartite agreement with then-presidents of Russia Boris Yeltsin and Ukraine Leonid Kravchuk to eliminate the arsenal of strategic nuclear weapons on Ukrainian territory. According to Clinton, the Ukrainian side “was afraid to give it up.”
The ex-US president also urged the West to continue to support Kyiv. He allowed that there will come a time when the Ukrainian government decides it might consider a peace deal, but stressed that Western countries should not abandon Kyiv.
Following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement of Moscow’s plans to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, a public petition was launched on the website of the presidential administration of Ukraine calling for nuclear weapons to be placed on Ukrainian territory or armed with its own nuclear weapons.
The Kremlin considered such calls very dangerous.
The Budapest Memorandum, signed in 1994 by Great Britain, Russia, the United States and Ukraine, provided guarantees for the security and territorial integrity of Ukraine in exchange for Kyiv’s renunciation of nuclear weapons.
After the entry of Crimea into Russia, the Ukrainian authorities have already proposed to refer to this document. In 2016, Petro Poroshenko, then President of the country, proposed to involve the signatory countries of the Budapest Memorandum in the negotiation process.
In April 2019, Oleksandr Turchynov, then Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC), said that “nuclear disarmament was a historical mistake” of Ukraine.
Source: Rosbalt
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