Speaking to the 2022 Copenhagen Democracy Summit by video-link, the Ukrainian leader said: “Only during Russia’s war against Ukraine, and I want to remind you that it started in 2014, not on 24 February [2022], Russia has violated about 400 different international treaties to which our countries are parties.”
The president gave numerous examples of treaties he claimed Russia had violated, including the UN Charter.
He said people should recall the Budapest memorandum, claiming Russia has “added maximum cynicism to the whole picture” by violating it. “With this violation, Russia has put an end to the whole struggle for nuclear disarmament in the world.”
The Budapest memorandum was an agreement in 1994 in which Ukraine would give up the nuclear weapons that it had inherited from the Soviet era, in exchange for “assurances” about its future security agreed by Russia, the US and Britain.
