US will lose face if it abandons Kyiv to Putin, ex-president of Ukraine warns

Ukraine's former president Leonid Kuchma has warned that the US "will lose face before the entire world" if it abandons Kyiv, and said mistakes by the west contributed to Vladimir Putin's all-out invasion last year.

- Luke Harding

In his first interview with a western publication since 2015, Kuchma described Putin as a career KGB operative. "It's his profession, with everything that implies," he said, adding: "People say his obsession with Ukraine is a kind of mania or mental disorder. Maybe it's true." On 24 February 2022, Kuchma and his wife Lyudmila awoke to explosions in Kyiv. "It was terrible, a shock.

I saw two bombers flying over my head in the street." Putin's goal is not only to seize land but to destroy the "concept" of Ukraine itself, he said. "The proof of this is the terrible human losses and reputational sacrifices that Putin is willing to make," he suggested.

Kuchma-a Russian speaker from Ukraine's industrial south-east - was president of Ukraine between 1994 and 2005. He signed two agreements with Russia that guaranteed Ukraine's post-USSR borders - the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and a 1997 treaty of friendship, negotiated with Boris Yeltsin.

The first indication of Moscow's revisionist ambitions came in 2003, Kuchma said, when Putin laid claim to the small island of Tuzla in the Black Sea. On that occasion Putin backed down. He gave further "clear signals" of his intention to expand Russia's borders by force in 2008, when he sent troops into neighbouring Georgia, and in spring 2014 by seizing Crimea.