The former US president spoke about the conversation with Vladimir Putin.
In 2011, former US President Bill Clinton suggested that a full-scale conflict would occur between Russia and Ukraine. The politician told the Financial Times. According to him, he came to this conclusion after a conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Former US President Bill Clinton made a sensational statement during his speech in New York with his wife Hillary Clinton. The former head of the White House admitted having had a conversation about this with Vladimir Putin in 2011. Then the Russian president told him that he did not agree with the Budapest memorandum, according to which the Ukraine was deprived of nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees.
“In 2011, three years before Crimea, Vladimir Putin told me that he did not agree with the agreement I had made with Boris Yeltsin. He said: ‘I don’t agree with that and I don’t support it. And I do not consider myself bound by this treaty. And from that day on, I knew that this full-scale conflict is only a matter of time,” Clinton recalled.
The Budapest Memorandum was signed in 1994 by the leaders of Russia, the United States, Great Britain and Ukraine – Boris Yeltsin, Bill Clinton, John Major and Leonid Kuchma. The agreement provided for the withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Ukrainian territory and their transfer to Russia. In exchange for this, the parties to the memorandum gave Kyiv security guarantees.
Vladimir Putin and Bill Clinton. Photo: Kremlin.ru. It is curious that Clinton for some reason mentions 2011, when Dmitry Medvedev was President of the Russian Federation. According to TASS, Vladimir Putin was at the Davos forum in 2009. It was then that he had a conversation with the ex-president of the United States.
The Russian leader’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, noted that the meeting between Putin and Clinton then had a “very friendly and informal character”. The two politicians discussed the situation in the world and Russian-American relations.
At a meeting in New York, Bill Clinton urged the West to continue supporting Ukraine. He also suggested that the Ukraine conflict may have forced Chinese President Xi Jinping to forcibly postpone the issue of reunification with Taiwan.
Earlier, Clinton, 76, mocked incumbent US President Joe Biden. He pretended to have lost his “cheat sheet,” then suggested Biden swap papers with a speech.
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