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By Eric Mack From Newsmax

Former President Bill Clinton admitted he should be considered at fault for Russia’s Vladimir Putin-ordered invasion of Ukraine because he “got them to agree to give up their nuclear weapons.”

Putin would not have “pulled this stunt” if Ukraine still had nuclear weapons, Clinton told Irish broadcaster RTÊ’s “Prime Time” on Tuesday.

“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 was president during the dismantling of the former Soviet Union, when Ukraine was among the Soviet republics to have voted to break off from Russia.

Boris Yeltsin was the first president of Russia post-USSR, and he ordered the army to shell and storm the country’s legislature on Oct. 4, 1993, during the first year of the Clinton administration.

In the final year of the Clinton administration, then-Prime Minister Putin was appointed president as Yeltsin resigned Dec. 31, 1999, amid Russian turmoil.

“Well, I knew that President Putin did not support the agreement that President Yeltsin made: never to interfere with Ukraine’s territorial boundaries because he wanted Ukraine to give up their nuclear weapons,” Clinton told RTÊ, noting the fateful decision led to Putin’s eventual invasion and annexation of Crimea during former President Barack Obama’s administration — the next Democrat to have served as U.S. president after Clinton.

“When it became convenient to him, President Putin broke it and first took Crimea, and I feel terrible about it, because Ukraine is a very important country,” Clinton added to RTÊ.

In his second year in office, Clinton signed a tripartite agreement with then-President Yeltsin and former Ukraine President Leonid Kravchuk, handing Ukraine’s nuclear weapons over to Russia for the promise to respect Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty.

“I think what Mr. Putin did was very wrong, and I believe Europe and the United States should continue to support Ukraine,” Clinton said. “There may come a time when the Ukrainian government believes that they can think of a peace agreement they could live with, but I don’t think the rest of us should cut and run on them.”

University of Galway law lecturer Larry Donnelly said Clinton’s “very frank” mea culpa was the result of globalist idealism and denuclearization efforts.

“It is understandable in light of everything that has happened why he feels that regret that he does,” Donnelly told RTÊ. “At the same time, it is understandable why he did what he did, trying to denuclearize the world, trying to improve relations and engage constructively with Russia.

“Of course it is also understandable why the Ukrainian people are angry about that.”

Ultimately, Clinton’s admission of guilt should be “featured more prominently in the debate in the United States about whether supporting Ukraine is the right thing, or not, to do.”

“A lot of Americans say, This is a problem very far away from us, why should we be involved? But I think a lot of them could be moved at a moral level if they saw the United States’ role in what happened in 1994,” Donnelly concluded.

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