Bill Clinton Says He Regrets Persuading Ukraine to Give up Nuclear Weapons

U.S. President Bill Clinton (L), Russian President Boris Yeltsin (C) and Ukrainian counterpart Leonid M. Kravchuk (R) join hands after signing a nuclear disarmament agreement in the Kremlin, Russia, on Jan. 14, 1994. Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images

Former President Bill Clinton has said that he regrets persuading Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons in the 1990s.

He told Irish outlet RTE on April 4 that he bears responsibility for encouraging Ukraine to dispose of its nuclear warheads in a 1994 agreement between Kyiv, Washington, and Moscow after the end of the Cold War.

Under the agreement, Ukraine, which was then the world’s third largest nuclear power, agreed to turn its entire strategic nuclear stockpile over to Russia for destruction.

Clinton believes that Russia would probably not have attempted to seize the Donbas region last February if his administration was less adamant at removing nuclear weapons from Ukraine.

“I feel a personal stake because I got them [Ukraine] to agree to give up their nuclear weapons. And none of them believe that Russia would have pulled this stunt if Ukraine still had their weapons,” Clinton said.

He said he felt saddened that the 1994 agreement which he helped formulate had paved the way to a bloody conflict that has killed or wounded hundreds of thousands on both sides.

West and Russia Forced Ukraine to Forfeit Nuclear Deterrent

In January 1994, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Clinton signed a tripartite agreement with then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk, to eliminate the Soviet-era arsenal of nuclear weapons remaining on Ukrainian soil.

Washington was also party to a related agreement later the same year, known as the Budapest Memorandum, along with the UK and Russia, in which all signatories would respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity, after it agreed to hand over its nukes to Russia.

That pledge was broken when Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and parts of the Donbas in 2014, in the middle of a civil conflict between Kyiv and ethnic Russian separatists in those regions.

“I knew that President [Vladimir] Putin did not support the agreement President Yeltsin made never to interfere with Ukraine’s territorial boundaries—an agreement he made because he wanted Ukraine to give up their nuclear weapons,” Clinton said.

“They were afraid to give them up because they thought that’s the only thing that protected them from an expansionist Russia,” he recalled, a concern that has become more relevant today.

“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 president added.

Clinton said that it was essential that the United States and its NATO allies continue to send aid to Ukraine, until a peace agreement with Moscow that is favorable to Kyiv can be reached.

“I think what Mr. Putin did was very wrong, and I believe Europe and the United States should continue to support Ukraine. 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 said.

Casualties Mount as War Continues

According to data released by the United Nations Human Rights Office on Feb.13, at least 8,000 non-combatants were confirmed killed in Ukraine, with 13,300 injured.

The U.N. believes that these numbers are just “tip of the iceberg” and that the true death toll is likely to be higher.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, said that civilians have been killed “in their homes and while simply trying to meet their essential needs, such as collecting water and buying food.”

Combat fatalities in the Russia–Ukraine crisis have been notoriously difficult to estimate, as officials in both countries are thought to be playing down their own troop losses while inflating the enemy’s, making it very hard to get accurate numbers.