Bill Clinton: “In 2011, I realized that Putin’s attack on Ukraine is only a matter of time”
Former US President Bill Clinton:
“Vladimir Putin did not want to recognize the 1994 international agreement on security guarantees for Ukraine in exchange for its renunciation of nuclear weapons.” This was told by former US President Bill Clinton, who, together with Boris Yeltsin, participated in the preparation and signing of the Budapest Memorandum.
Clinton and then-Prime Minister Putin met at the World Economic Forum summit in Davos. “Vladimir Putin told me in 2011, three years before he took over Crimea, that he did not agree with the agreement I made with Boris Yeltsin,” Clinton said at an event in New York where he and his wife Hillary gave interview. According to him, Putin said:
I don’t agree with him. I don’t support him. And it doesn’t restrict me.
“And from that day on, I knew,” Clinton added, that Putin’s attack on Ukraine was “only a matter of time.”
Memorandum on security guarantees in connection with Ukraine’s accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (Budapest Memorandum) is an interstate document signed on December 5, 1994 by the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, Great Britain and the United States. The last three countries have committed themselves to respect the independence, sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine, to refrain from threats or the use of force and economic pressure, and in the event of any threats to Ukraine with the use of nuclear weapons, to demand immediate action from the UN Security Council.
Bill and Hillary Clinton, who was Secretary of State under Barack Obama and in 2009 tried to implement his announced “reset” in relations with Russia (where Dmitry Medvedev temporarily replaced Putin as president), said that the West needs to increase support for Ukraine. In their opinion, she can win the war with Russia if she is provided with the necessary weapons and ammunition.
Failure to defend Ukraine will give courage and aggressiveness not only to Putin, but also to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Hillary Clinton believes. In her opinion, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Xi could start an operation to annex Taiwan within two to three years. But the failure of the Russian army and the rebuff given by the West to Russian aggression could force Xi Jinping to postpone it.
Clinton also shared her opinion about Putin:
Putin is waging what he sees as a righteous fight to undermine Western democracy and restore, as far as possible, the Russian Empire. Therefore, he is not going to stop.
For the armed conflict in Europe to end, Ukraine must either defeat Russia, or at least liberate the territories occupied since the start of the war, Clinton said. Kiev needs “leverage,” she said: “I would under no circumstances trust Putin at the negotiating table if the Ukrainians (with our support) don’t have enough leverage.”
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In my article, Ukraine: The right of self-determination supersedes sovereign inviolability, I wrote:
They cite the Budapest Memorandum, of 1994 in which signatories, including Russia and the US, committed to ““refrain from threatening or using military force or economic coercion against Ukraine and undertook to respect Ukrainian independence and sovereignty in the existing (1994) borders.”, They claim the 2022 Russian invasion violated this fundamental commitment.
They ignore the fact that the CIA orchestrated coup disrespected the sovereignty of Ukraine, employed coercive actions against the political independence of Ukraine, and subordinated the economic interests of Ukraine to that of the EU, and thereby violated the provisions 1, 2 and 3 of the Bucharest Memorandum, respectively, and, these actions, each of which preceded Russia’s invasion of Crimea, actually triggered Russia’s occupation of the Crimea..
The 2014 CIA masterminded coup, sometimes referred to as the Maiden uprising, which removed the pro-Russian head of state, Viktor Yanukovych and installed a pro-West head of state is not mentioned. That’s OK in their book, but best forgotten. They take no responsibility for the bombardment by Ukrainian Army of the citizens of the Donbass since then, killing over 10,000. Nor do they acknowledge the role of the Nazi Azov Battalion which Ukraine made part of their army and which did most of the killing.
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