fleet, based in Sevastopol, and, indirectly, Russian sovereignty over the whole Crimean Peninsula. Rutskoi publicly warned Kiev against conflict with Moscow, which both had nuclear weapons and had the ability to claim sovereignty over Crimea. In April 1992 and March 1993 two similar resolutions that claimed Crimea were passed by the Russian Federation parliament. The Ukrainians naturally turned for help to the United States, but it sought to aggregate Soviet nuclear weapons in the hands of Moscow and to occupy ex-Soviet scientists with the Nunn–Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction programme. The Budapest Memorandum, which was co-written by Kozyrev, provided security assurances to the three minor ex-Soviet countries in exchange for their accession to the Nuclear non-proliferation treaty and security guarantees from Russia, the US and Great Britain. By the end of 1996 all nuclear weapons were removed to Russian territory, and 18 years later Vladimir Putin reneged on the deal. State Duma In the December 1993 elections, Kozyrev ran for a seat in the lower house, the State Duma, as a candidate on the list of the liberal Russia's Choice bloc in the Murmansk region. He took a seat as a representative from Murmansk when the State Duma met in January 1994, having won 60 percent of the vote in a field of 10. He had been blamed for the international controversy over the conflict in Chechnya. He had also been targeted as a scapegoat for failing to stop North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bombing of the Bosnian Serbs and of NATO plans to expand into Eastern Europe. Kozyrev was criticized by the Russian State Duma for capitulating to the West, which led to Russia's loss of "superpower" status, as well as for the alleged failure to support the Bosnian Serbs during the Bosnian War. After being elected a second time to the State Duma in Murmansk in January 1996, Kozyrev left the ministry as from now on it was prohibited to occupy both positions. He was succeeded as head of the MFA by Yevgeny Primakov. It was a political choice both by him and president. When asked if he had been "sacrificed by Yeltsin ... to pacify anti-reform forces?", Kozyrev told the Los Angeles Times, "of course, there has been some backtracking. Let's face it, there is stagnation. ... It was a genuine political conflict. I lost. I was overruled. I believe that my time will come again, that my