The former US president believes Russia would have not dared to attack, if Kiev still had its nukes.

President Putin would have ordered the invasion of neighboring Ukraine should the latter had nuclear weapons, former US president Bill Clinton said in an interview for RTE while addressing his role in Kiev’s decision to get rid of its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal.

Clinton said he regretted for persuading the Ukrainians to let the Russians withdraw the missiles from their country in 1994. If Kiev had those weapons today, the Kremlin would have stayed out of Ukraine, he noted. 

"I feel a personal stake because I got them 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," the former president said.

In January 1994, Bill Clinton, Russia’s Boris Yeltsin and Ukraine’s Leonid Kravchuk signed an agreement to eliminate the strategic nuclear weapons that remained on Ukrainian territory after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

In December same year, the Russian Federation, along with the US and UK concluded a document known as the Budapest Memorandum to guarantee the independence, territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Ukrainian state. 

Russia violated its commitments 20 years later, when it seized the Crimean Peninsula and the Donbas region from Ukraine.

The United States and the United Kingdom, along with the European Union, are supporting Ukraine in the war Russia openly unleashed in February 2022.