Declassified: Richard Nixon had warned of possible war in Ukraine

Former US president Richard Nixon had warned his successor Bill Clinton in the early 90s that Ukraine could plunge into bloody turmoil, a declassified document cited by the Wall Street Journal has revealed.

In the letter, dated March 21, 1994, and a few weeks before his death, Nixon expressed his views on the post-Soviet political landscape no sooner than he returned from a trip to Russia and Ukraine.

The Clinton Presidential Library released the contents of the letter.

Nixon described Ukraine as an “indispensable” country, warning its internal dynamics were “highly explosive.”

Nixon warned then-president Bill Clinton that if there was a conflict in Ukraine, the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina would look like a “garden party.”

“If it is allowed to get out of control, it will make Bosnia look like a PTA garden party,” he said, referring to the 1992-1995 ethnic conflict in the Balkans that claimed the lives of thousands of people.

Nixon had urged Clinton to broaden the United States’s diplomatic presence in Ukraine and prioritize funding for Kiev.

Nixon had noted that then-Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s political clout had “rapidly deteriorated” and that “the days of his unquestioned leadership of Russia are numbered.”

Yeltsin came to indulge himself in longer drinking bouts, Nixon had commented, and could no longer deliver on his commitments to Western leaders in “an increasingly anti-American environment in the [State] Duma and in the country.”

The late US president had also been uncertain as to who could replace Yeltsin, but had suggested Russia’s anti-Western camp could bring a “credible candidate for president.” Yeltsin stepped down in late 1999. Vladimir Putin, the current president of Russia, stepped up to the helm.

In 2014, relations between Russia and Ukraine were on the decline. A Western-backed coup in Kiev had culminated in the establishment of a government with Western inclinations.

In the same year, the Kremlin recognized the Donbass republics in eastern Ukraine as independent states. Russia demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that would never join any Western military alliance. The regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, as well as Kherson and Zaporozhye, joined the Russian Federation after referendums.

Senior officials in Moscow say Russia’s concerns about the failure of the Minsk agreements drove it to launch the “special military operation” in Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The Minsk deals, signed in 2014 and 2015, were brokered by Russia, France and Germany.

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