During the events of 2014, the US and its allies did not provide Ukraine with financial assistance to purchase weapons for the defence of Crimea, emphasising a diplomatic settlement. This was stated by Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Chairman of the Kyiv Security Forum and Prime Minister of Ukraine from 2014 to 2016, in an interview with ‘Ukrainska Pravda’, in response to a question about the alleged ban imposed by then US President Barack Obama on defending Crimea.
Yatsenyuk emphasised that the West had proved unprepared for such a turn of events. “It must be said frankly that the White House and the US administration, and the G7 as a whole, were unprepared; they did not know how to act in this situation,” he noted.
The former prime minister illustrated this lack of preparedness by describing the atmosphere at his first meetings in Washington. “I went straight to the White House. It was March. At not a single meeting did they even hint that Ukraine would be supplied with weapons. Instead, at every meeting, we had to hear them say 150 times that we would do everything to achieve a diplomatic settlement,” he noted.
Yatsenyuk added that the West “did not give a single cent to buy weapons”. “They didn’t give anything at all,” he emphasised.
The former prime minister described the adoption of the first ‘anti-Russian’ UN resolution and the imposition of international sanctions against the aggressor state as the main diplomatic achievement of that period. “During my address to the UN Security Council, I managed to [emphasise Ukraine’s position] and subsequently secure the adoption of a [General Assembly] resolution in which 100 UN member states, for the first time, spoke out against Russia and recognised the annexation of Crimea as illegal. And we succeeded in initiating the process of imposing sanctions,” Yatsenyuk noted.
In 2014, Ukraine had only 5,000 military personnel capable of carrying out combat missions, so any attempt to defend Crimea under such circumstances could have led to the loss not only of the peninsula but of the entire country, Yatsenyuk emphasised.
“We had two options in 2014. The first was to send the 5,000 combat-ready [servicemen] of the Armed Forces, who were spread across the whole of Ukraine. Or to hold on to Ukraine and hope that a diplomatic settlement might work,” he said.
According to him, he received information on the number of combat-ready troops from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence, marked ‘confidential’, whilst he was head of the government.
Yatsenyuk emphasised that at that time the Ukrainian army was in a critical state: the troops lacked uniforms, fuel and serviceable equipment. Part of the military infrastructure was, in fact, not ready for combat.
“Had it not been for the volunteers and had we not managed to stabilise the overall situation, Putin would have gone further, and large-scale aggression would have begun not in 2022, but in 2014,” the former prime minister emphasised.