5/6/2023 0 Comments Bill clinton ischedule![]() When Ukraine willingly returned its nuclear weapons to Russia, it did so under the understanding that the smaller country would never need them to defend itself in future. In total, Ukraine surrendered around 5,000 strategic and tactical nuclear weapons, which for a brief moment had made it the third-largest nuclear power in the world. ![]() At the time, this inherited nuclear arsenal included 176 intercontinental ballistic missile launchers armed with 1,240 nuclear warheads, 700 nuclear cruise missiles arming 44 strategic bombers, and almost 3,000 tactical nuclear weapons, according to think tank the Wilson Center. The agreement also set the stage for Ukraine’s later inclusion in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as a nonnuclear-weapon state, something Kravchuk then wanted to see happen “in the shortest possible time.” Ukraine would join the NPT later that year, along with fellow former Soviet Republics Belarus and Kazakhstan.Īs part of the agreement, Ukraine not only agreed not to develop nuclear weapons in the future, but it also relinquished the atomic remnants of the bygone Soviet era back to Russia for dismantlement. In January 1994, one year into his first term as president, Clinton helped negotiate an agreement between Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk to transfer all nuclear warheads in Ukraine to Russia. “Ukraine is a very important country, and I feel a personal stake because I got them to agree to give up their nuclear weapons, and none of them believed that Russia would have pulled this stunt if Ukraine still had their weapons,” Clinton said in an interview with Irish broadcaster RTE that aired Tuesday. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |