THE former US president, Bill Clinton he stated in an interview with RTÉ that he regrets persuading Ukraine to give up its nuclear arsenal.

“I feel a personal stake because I got them (the Ukrainians) to agree to give up their nuclear weapons. And none of them believe that Russia would have invaded if Ukraine still had its weapons.”Bill Clinton said.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine became the third largest nuclear power in the world. But in 1994, after talks between the US, Russia and Ukraine, Bill Clinton announced that Ukraine had agreed to give up nuclear weapons on its soil.

“I knew that President Putin had not supported the agreement that President Yeltsin made never to interfere in Ukraine’s territorial borders – an agreement that he made because he wanted Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons.”Clinton said, according to RTÉ.

“Ukraine was afraid to give up because they believed that was the only thing protecting them from an expansionist Russia” he added.

In February 2014, Russia invaded and annexed the Crimean peninsula, violating the Budapest Memorandum, among other agreements.

“When it became convenient for him, President Putin broke it and seized Crimea first. And I feel terrible about that because Ukraine is a very important country,” Clinton pointed out.

In 1994, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, US President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister John Major signed the Budapest Memorandum under which Ukraine agreed to remove all nuclear weapons from its soil in return for security guarantees from the signatories, USA, UK and Russia.