(TheLastPatriotNews.com) – Former President Bill Clinton has admitted he is “at fault” for the invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s Russia because, in the 1990s, he convinced the Ukrainians to give up nuclear weapons they had inherited from the collapsed Soviet Union.
Clinton admitted that he “got them to agree to give up their nuclear weapons,” which decades later allowed a nuclear-armed Russia to attack Ukraine without fearing the most severe retaliation.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, three of its smaller republics – Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan – inherited enough nukes to be ranked as the most significant nuclear powers after Russia and the United States.
In the early 1990s, their leaders agreed to surrender the nukes in exchange for aid and security guarantees – such as the non-binding 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Russia, the US, and the UK promised to guarantee the security of Ukraine.
A full 20 years later, in 2014, Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin violated the promise by invading Ukraine in Crimea and Donbas. Then, in 2022, he launched a full-scale invasion by attacking it from three sides.
“I feel a personal stake because I got them to agree to give up their nuclear weapons, and none of them believed that Russia would have pulled this stunt if Ukraine still had their weapons,” former US President Bill Clinton told Irish broadcaster RTE.
Throughout the 1990s, Clinton, who was in the White House from 1993-2001, collaborated with post-Soviet Russia’s first leader, Boris Yeltsin, to reduce the number of nuclear warheads in the former Soviet space.
Putin was appointed president in the final year of the Clinton administration after Yeltsin resigned on December 31, 1999.
“Well, I knew that President Putin did not support the agreement that President Yeltsin made: never to interfere with Ukraine’s territorial boundaries because he wanted Ukraine to give up their nuclear weapons,” Clinton said.
“When it became convenient to him, President Putin broke it and first took Crimea, and I feel terrible about it because Ukraine is a very important country,” the former US president added.
He recalled how in his second year in office, he, Yeltsin, and then-Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk signed a tripartite deal handing Ukraine’s nuclear weapons over to Russia for the promise to respect Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty.
“I think what Mr. Putin did was very wrong, and I believe Europe and the United States should continue to support Ukraine,” Clinton said.
“There may come a time when the Ukrainian government believes that they can think of a peace agreement they could live with, but I don’t think the rest of us should cut and run on them,” he added.
University of Galway law professor Larry Donnelly said Clinton’s “very frank” admission of fault resulted from his denuclearization efforts.
“It is understandable why he did what he did, trying to denuclearize the world, trying to improve relations and engage constructively with Russia. Of course, it is also understandable why the Ukrainian people are angry about that,” he elaborated.
Donnelly argued Clinton’s admission should be “featured more prominently in the debate in the United States about whether supporting Ukraine is the right thing, or not, to do.”
“A lot of Americans say, ‘This is a problem very far away from us, why should we be involved?’ But I think a lot of them could be moved at a moral level if they saw the United States’ role in what happened in 1994,” the professor concluded
Former President Bill Clinton admitted he should be considered at fault for Russia's Vladimir Putin-ordered invasion of Ukraine because he "got them to agree to give up their nuclear weapons." https://t.co/c1pGhFMBRL
— NEWSMAX (@NEWSMAX) April 5, 2023
