Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin has said that, before signing the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine had to negotiate on legal, rather than political, security guarantees while giving up on its nuclear arsenal.
"I think in 1994, it was necessary to achieve legal, not political security guarantees. As now we can see, legal security guarantees are a key issue for our national security. We tried many times to arrange a meeting in the Budapest format. Russia in its documents said it was Ukraine which had actually violated the Budapest agreements by organizing a 'putsch'. This is Russia's logic," Klimkin said in an interview with CurrentTime.
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"And I believe none of the Budapest Memorandum signatories did anything that should have been done in the context of protecting our national security. I tell our American and British friends the same thing," the foreign minister said.
"The problem lays both with the content of the Budapest Memorandum and its form, as well as how the agreements were implemented. This is a complex problem that affects the modern world because now no one believes in political guarantees by definition. Unfortunately, this has become a very difficult conclusion for us: how one should build a guarantee system in general," Klimkin said.
UNIAN memo. The signatory states of the Budapest Memorandum, among which were Ukraine, the U.S., Russia and the United Kingdom, in addition to pledging not to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, also pledged to respect the independence, sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine and refrain from the threat of force or its use against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and pledged that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the United Nations Charter.
