Former US President Bill Clinton claims foreknowledge of Putin's 2014 attack on Ukraine

Former United States (US) President Bill Clinton has claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin informed him, three years prior to the 2014 attack on Ukraine, that he did not feel obligated to adhere to the Budapest Memorandum, which guarantees Ukraine's territorial integrity.

The disclosure brings into question whether the United States and its European allies were sufficiently prepared for the 2014 assault, during which Russia annexed Crimea and launched an attack on the Donbas region, reported The Guardian.

According to Clinton, he had a conversation with the Russian President at the 2011 World Economic Forum in Davos, during which Putin raised the topic of the memorandum. The Budapest Memorandum, signed in 1994 by Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, stipulated that these nations would abandon the nuclear weapons they inherited from the Soviet Union on their territories, in exchange for guarantees that their sovereignty would be honored "within existing borders."

The Budapest Memorandum was signed by Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, as well as Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Boris Yeltsin signed on behalf of Russia, while Bill Clinton represented the United States, and John Major acted as the third guarantor on behalf of the United Kingdom.

“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 at 92nd Street Y, a Jewish cultural and community centre in New York.

“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.’

“I knew from that day forward, it was just a matter of time,” the former president said of Putin launching an attack.

Putin had already launched an invasion of Chechnya in 1999, and Georgia in 2008.

Have not signed any obligatory documents: Putin

Following the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Putin stated that Russia was no longer bound by the Budapest Memorandum, arguing that the Maidan revolution and subsequent change of government in Kyiv had resulted in Ukraine becoming a different state. Putin argued that Russia had not signed any binding agreements with the new government, saying "We have not signed any obligatory documents."

However, his conversation with Clinton suggests Putin had decided not to honour the agreement years before the Maidan uprising, reported The Guardian.

The Guardian quoted Daniel Fried, a former assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, who said Putin’s remarks to Clinton were not made widely known among members of the Obama administration, but added he assumed the former president must have told his wife, Hillary, who was secretary of state.

Fried, now a fellow at the Atlantic Council, said Putin had threatened Ukrainian territorial integrity three years before the Davos meeting with Clinton, at a Nato-Russia council meeting in April 2008, during the Bush administration. Putin declared that when Crimea had been transferred from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954 “not all legal procedures were followed”.

Fried said: “I was present, sitting next to the then Polish national security adviser, Mariusz Handzlik. We both stood up in alarm and turned to each other, saying, ‘Did you just hear what I heard?’

“From that moment, I thought Putin would turn on Ukraine and said so to Condi Rice and Steve Hadley,” he added, referring to the secretary of state and national security adviser respectively in the Bush administration.

“The US government was surprised by the Crimean operation but should not have been, given the warnings,” Fried said.