‘Just a matter of time’: Was Bill Clinton aware of Putin’s plan to invade Ukraine?

Russian president Vladimir Putin told Bill Clinton three years prior to his 2014 attackon Ukraine that he was not obligated by the Budapest Memorandum's guarantee of the nation's territorial integrity, according to the former US President.The disclosureraises concerns about whether the US and its European allies may have been better prepared for the attack in 2014 when Russia invaded the Donbasand annexed Crimea.

At the 2011 World Economic Forum in Davos, Clinton claimed to have spoken with the Russian president. During the discussion, Putin brought up the 1994 Memorandum,which required Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to give up the nuclear arsenals they had received from the Soviet Union in exchange for assurancethat their sovereignty would be respected "within existing borders."

Boris Yeltsin signed it on behalf of Russia, Bill Clinton on behalf of the US, and John Major on behalf of the UK, which served as a third guaranteeing country.

“Putin told me in 2011, three years before he took Crimea, that he did not agree with the agreement I made with Boris Yeltsin, that they would respect Ukraine’s territory if they gave up their nuclear weapons,” Clinton said on Thursday at a public discussion at92nd Street Y, a Jewish cultural and community centre in New York, as reported by the Guardian.

“Putin said to me: ‘… I know Boris agreed to go along with you and John Major and Nato, but he never got it through the Duma [Russian parliament]. We have our extreme nationalists too. I don’t agree with it and I do not support it and I’m not bound by it," he added.

“I knew from that day forward, it was just a matter of time,” the former president added.

The Maidan revolution and the change in government in Kyiv earlier that year meant that Ukraine had become a different state, according to Putin, who asserted that Russia was not bound by the Budapest Memorandum after seizing Crimea in 2014.

“In respect to this state, we have not signed any obligatory documents,” he said.

His meeting with Clinton, however, reveals that Putin had already made up his mind about severing the agreement years before the Maidan uprising.

Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014

In February 2014, during the most catastrophic stages of the EuroMaidan Revolution that finally led to the ousting of Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian former president of Ukraine, Russia invaded the Crimean Peninsula.

Around 30,000 Russian troops entered Crimea while Yanukovych's pro-Russian regime massacred protesters in central Kiev, and they took control of the peninsula by early March 2014.

In some ways, the event started Russia's ongoing conflict with Ukraine. Since then, the Russian military has kept control over Crimea.

With the exception of a small number of nations who are associated with Russia, many nations have publicly denounced the unlawful takeover of Crimea and continue to recognise it as being a part of Ukraine, as reported by the Kyiv Independent.

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