Clinton Nails Putin

The truth is starting to be revealed.

Former United States President Bill Clinton has said that back in 2011, after a conversation with former Russian President (then head of government) Vladimir Putin, he realized that a war between Russia and Ukraine was only a matter of time.

Bill Clinton drew this conclusion from an exchange of views with Vladimir Putin on the Budapest Memorandum. The Russian leader told the former US president that he did not consider himself bound by that document.

The timing of the conversation between Clinton and Putin is noteworthy. It was the year 2011. Ukraine was headed by Viktor Yanukovych, who was trying to build informal relations with Russian leaders and agreed to sign the Kharkiv agreements.

It would seem that Russia should be interested in remaining the security guarantor of a friendly state. Yet Putin had a completely different view. He was not even interested in a friendly Ukraine led by a puppet president. He was interested in "historical Russia", which he views within the framework of the Soviet Union of 1991. Ukraine for him is a political and civilisational misunderstanding.

Ten years after his conversation with Bill Clinton, he will set out his views in an article entitled "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians". The Kremlin press service has even translated it into Ukrainian. Russia clearly demonstrates: Ukraine as a state and Ukrainians as a people do not exist in any language, not even in Ukrainians' own language.

Perhaps for those who have not tried to follow Vladimir Putin's statements and career, his straightforward conversation with Bill Clinton will come as a revelation. After all, in 2011 Putin did not speak so openly about the "future" of Ukraine. On the contrary, he preferred to talk about the friendship and understanding of the neighbouring countries.

However, even then I heard from my interlocutors - Western politicians, diplomats and journalists - that Putin did not hide from them his vision of the future and had no doubt: sooner or later Ukraine would become part of Russia.

Unfortunately, no one was willing to speak publicly about those private conversations at the time. No one spoke publicly about conversations with Putin's friends like Gerhard Schroeder and Silvio Berlusconi. And these reputable Western politicians, the heads of leading governments, were not shy about relaying to their colleagues Putin's words that Ukraine, like other former Soviet republics, were "artificial entities".

Bill Clinton was one of the first Western politicians who decided to tell the public the details of his private communication with the Russian president. And, as a journalist, I am grateful to him for that. Because now I have an authoritative source to validate my information.

Now there will be more such evidence. Daniel Fried, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, in his commentary on Clinton's remarks, recalled how back in 2008, at a Russia-NATO Council meeting, Putin told Western counterparts about the non-compliance with the legal procedures regarding the transfer of Crimea from the RSFSR. This made a big impression on Fried.

But it was 2008, after all! Was Putin already Putin then? Putin has always been Putin. It's just that most of the Ukrainian and Western political elites did not want to believe in the seriousness of the danger - even at a time when Putin was explicitly articulating his wishes.

Underestimating the ambitions and intentions of the Russian leader is a serious problem and one of the causes of the large-scale war. It is even more dangerous to underestimate Putin's intentions today, when war is in full swing.

Vitaly Portnikov, Radio Svaboda