Thursday, October 9, 2025

Polaris of Enlightenment

UN advisor: “The West forced the war”

The war in Ukraine

  • Prominent economist and geopolitical analyst Jeffrey Sachs, a professor at Columbia University and long-time advisor to the UN Secretary-General, levels severe criticism at the Western handling of the conflict in Ukraine.
  • The conflict could easily have been avoided with a sincere willingness to compromise on the part of the West, Sachs stresses, pointing out that the war in Ukraine was in fact forced by the eastward expansion of the US and NATO.
Published 8 October 2023
– By Editorial Staff
Jeffrey Sachs slams US foreign policy.
6 minute read

In an interview with journalist Andrew Napolitano, former judge in New Jersey’s state court, Sachs shares his analysis of the war in Ukraine and the historical background to the conflict. The prominent analyst traces the conflict back to at least the late 80s when both the USA and Germany assured that NATO would “not move an inch eastward” in connection with East Germany’s accession to West Germany, in a pledge not to threaten Soviet-Russian security interests. However, this verbal promise was broken almost immediately after the final fall of the Berlin Wall, and the military alliance began to expand towards Russia instead.

I actually go back to the late 80s and early 90s because President Gorbachev asked me to help his economic team. President Yeltsin asked me to help his economic team. President Kuchma, the first president of independent Ukraine, asked me to help his economic team. So I’ve watched this close up, notes Sachs on the origins of the conflict.

He points out that already at that time, judging by influential geopolitical advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, co-founder of the Trilateral Commission along with finance magnate and ultra-globalist David Rockefeller, there were long-term plans from the West to encircle Russia by expanding NATO all the way to Georgia and Ukraine. Sachs emphasizes that the goal of surrounding Russia in the Black Sea is a strategic concept that can be traced back to the mid-1800s and the Crimean War, where Ukraine has long been viewed as the obvious geographical center of Eurasia.

The idea was that U.S. military forces would be in Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia. And you look at the map, Saba Stoppel, the Russian base in 1783 is right there, and then it’s cornered. And the Russians knew this, and they were saying from the early 90s, “don’t do this”.

Ukraine was seen as a crucial piece in the global chess game by the American geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski. (Montage. Photo: TUBS/US DoD/CC BY-SA 3.0)

“The only red lines are American red lines”

NATO expanded through Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia as well as Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, and Slovakia – until Russia started to feel increasingly pressured. This led the country’s president, Vladimir Putin, to make clear at the security conference in Munich in 2007 that further NATO expansion couldn’t be accepted. He emphatically warned even then about the danger of an inevitable confrontation if the expansion continued on its current path.

President Putin at the Munich Security Conference really laid it out very clearly. He said, look, you guys promised in 1991, not one inch eastward, all you’re doing is threatening a new conflict stop. Well, I think the defining feature of American foreign policy is arrogance, and they can’t listen. They cannot hear red lines of any other country.

Sachs further notes that throughout the 2000s, the USA systematically carried out influence campaigns in Ukraine to bring the country into NATO. As early as 2004, he observes, the US-financed Orange Revolution took place in Ukraine to bring about a more pro-Western regime change, and in conjunction with this, the USA began publicly declaring that NATO should expand to include Ukraine. A multi-year power struggle ensued in the country, and in 2014, the democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who advocated for a neutral Ukraine, was overthrown as a result of the so-called Euromaidan protests. These protests followed Yanukovych’s halting of negotiations over a free trade agreement with the EU because Ukraine already had a free trade agreement with Russia, and all three parties needed to resolve the issue before making a decision.

It’s pretty clear in early 2014 that regime change and a typical kind of US covert regime change operation was underway. And I say typical because scholarly studies have shown that just during the Cold War period alone, there were 64 US regime covert regime change operations. This is a, it’s astounding. Serious scholarship has devoted its time to tracing all the times the US overthrows or tries to overthrow other governments. Well, there’s no doubt. The US overthrows Yanukovych, Sachs continues.

The government that subsequently took power in Ukraine, Sachs notes, was handpicked by the United States, as evidenced by a phone recording of Victoria Nuland from the US Department of State, which displayed a very aggressive stance towards the Russian population. In response, Sachs continues, Russia organized referendums in the ethnically Russian part of the Crimea region and annexed Crimea to Russia. The oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk, with a predominantly Russian population, refused to recognize the new regime in the country and declared independence, leading Ukraine to respond with military action—a conflict that has been ongoing since 2014.

– They were demanding the use of the Russian language, the Russian Orthodox Church, the relations with Russia, the family relations, the travel, the open borders, and so forth, Sachs explains.

– The war began with essentially right-wing militaries like the Azov Battalion and so forth. The Banderistas, pretty fascistic ideologies in some cases attacking in the east. And a lot of people died, thousands and thousands of people were being killed, civilians, ethnic Russian civilians, he concludes.

Russia and the West ultimately negotiated two peace agreements, including the Minsk II agreement which was meant to secure autonomy for Donetsk and Luhansk. The agreement was embraced by both the Ukrainian government and the breakaway republics, and it was guaranteed by Germany and France. The agreement also received unanimous support in the UN Security Council, but was never implemented by Ukraine. According to Sachs, Ukrainian and Western leaders never intended to adhere to it. He refers to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s later acknowledgment that the main purpose of the agreement was to buy time to continue arming the Ukrainian military.

The intention of the Minsk agreement was not to achieve consensus – but to arm Ukraine’s army, according to German Chancellor Angela Merkel (Photo: WEF/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

“It’s all terribly dangerous”

As recently as the end of 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed a draft security agreement between Russia and the USA, central to which was a halt to NATO expansion to prevent the outbreak of war, a suggestion that was also ignored by American authorities. It was the USA that decided to terminate negotiations between Ukraine and Russia according to Sachs because they did not want to appear “weak” in front of China.

On February 24, 2022, Russia initiated its military operation, which, according to Sachs, was primarily a last desperate attempt to get Western leaders to resume negotiations. According to the main negotiator, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, this was very close to happening until the West decided to withdraw from peace negotiations. Sachs regrets that even at this stage, a diplomatic solution was abandoned in favor of a confrontation that has been particularly devastating for Ukraine.

I know the economic side, that the sanctions weren’t going to work. I understood the diplomatic side. I didn’t know the the military side, but this has been a predictable bloodbath and the Americans have known it, says Sachs, who worries about a full-scale confrontation with the world’s two biggest nuclear powers, the US and Russia.

We’re told, oh, don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it. But I’ve been studying this issue also for decades. We should always worry about what intemperate, dangerous, people in dangerous circumstances can do, how accidents can happen, how we can lose control of events. It’s all terribly dangerous.


Economist with an extensive CV

Jeffrey Sachs is a prominent economist, geopolitical analyst, and economic advisor who has been ranked as one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time Magazine on two occasions. He earned his PhD at the age of 26 and became a professor at Harvard University at just 29 years old, where he spent two decades before taking a position at Columbia University.

Sachs is the chair of the UN Network for Sustainable Development Solutions, co-chair of the Council of Engineers for the Energy Transition, an academician at the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, and a commissioner for the UN Broadband Commission for Development.

He has also previously served as a special advisor to UN Secretary-Generals Kofi Annan, Ban Ki-moon, and Antonio Guterres, assisted Presidents Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Kutma, and has written a number of books that have made it onto American best-seller lists – including The End of Poverty and The Price of Civilization.

In total, Sachs has received 42 honorary doctorates and has also received honorary distinctions from, among others, the Presidents of France and Estonia.

Jeffrey Sachs, far right, at the World Trade Organization Forum. Photo: WTO/CC BY-SA 2.0

Watch the full interview here

The full interview with Andrew Napolitano and Jeffrey Sachs can be viewed here.

TNT is truly independent!

We don’t have a billionaire owner, and our unique reader-funded model keeps us free from political or corporate influence. This means we can fearlessly report the facts and shine a light on the misdeeds of those in power.

Consider a donation to keep our independent journalism running…

Islamist leader monitored by Swedish security police – now celebrated drone specialist in Ukraine

The war in Ukraine

Published yesterday 14:09
– By Editorial Staff
Viktor Gaziev is clear that he would never have joined the war without the involvement of Swedish authorities.
3 minute read

Sweden’s security police (Säpo) considered him such a dangerous threat that he was kept under daily surveillance. But in June 2023, Viktor Gaziev disappeared – and now he has been found in Ukraine where he has become a celebrated drone expert, received awards and met President Zelensky.

He claims that Swedish authorities pressured him to go to war and escorted him there.

Viktor Gaziev was one of the so-called six imams who in 2019 were classified as a serious threat to Sweden’s national security. The Swedish government decided to deport him, but the deportation was never carried out – Gaziev was deemed at risk of torture and persecution in his homeland Russia.

Instead, the radical Islamist was kept under extensive surveillance with daily reporting requirements to police. Until he suddenly disappeared.

Swedish public television SVT’s investigative program Uppdrag granskning has now tracked him down – not in Sweden, but as a drone specialist in the Ukrainian army.

Pressured to go to war

How did an internationally wanted person without travel documents and with daily reporting requirements at Gävle police station in central Sweden end up in Ukraine?

Gaziev himself describes it as the result of pressure from Sweden’s Security Police (Säpo). He claims that Säpo arranged a private meeting with his ex-wife and urged her to persuade him to leave. The incentive was allegedly a promise that the agency would not hinder her application for Swedish citizenship.

Several other people classified as security threats confirm to Uppdrag granskning that they received similar proposals to go to Ukraine.

However, Security Police operational chief Fredrik Hallström completely rejects the claims: “We do not conduct the type of activities alleged here”, he maintains, continuing:

— We do not suggest or try to persuade anyone to travel to a specific place. Least of all to war-torn Ukraine.

Military intelligence contact planned the trip

In chat conversations that Uppdrag granskning has accessed, it emerges how the trip to Ukraine was planned in detail. A person who identifies himself as a Swedish soldier discusses flight tickets to Poland and which border crossing they should use. Gaziev claims the person works for MUST, Sweden’s military intelligence service.

In the chat, Gaziev sends his bank details and shows military equipment he bought for the war. According to Gaziev, it was his contact person at the Security Police who gave him the contact to MUST.

— They talked to the military service in Poland. It was a man and a woman who flew with me to Warsaw without documents, without a passport, just a Swedish driver’s license.

MUST has refused to comment on the allegations at all.

Ukrainian commander confirms Swedish involvement

However, Murad Zumzo, a commander in the Ukrainian army, gives a completely different picture than Säpo. He says he spoke on the phone with a Swedish person who matched the name in the chat – and that the Swede had a central role in getting Gaziev to Ukraine.

— He made contact and took him to the Polish-Ukrainian border. I sent two of my guys there. The Swedes and Poles handed him over, says Zumzo.

Viktor Gaziev is clear that he would not have joined the war without Swedish authorities’ involvement and he took Säpo’s alleged promise about citizenship for his ex-wife very seriously.

But today he believes he was manipulated – his ex-wife was denied her citizenship application with reference to information from the Security Police itself.

Norwegian-led training base for Ukrainian soldiers opened in Poland

The new cold war

Published 2 October 2025
– By Editorial Staff
EU representatives visit Camp Jomsborg during the opening ceremony.
2 minute read

A Norwegian-led training center for Ukrainian troops has opened in southeastern Poland. Camp Jomsborg can accommodate up to 1,200 soldiers at a time and will focus on drone warfare.

The facility in Nowa Dęba-Lipa was inaugurated on Wednesday in the presence of defense ministers from Norway and Estonia, as well as representatives from Lithuania, Latvia, Sweden, Finland, Iceland and Denmark.

Camp Jomsborg, built by engineers from Norway’s Brigade Nord, represents another escalation of Western support for Ukraine since the war with Russia broke out in 2022. Poland has since become a central hub for logistics and training of Ukrainian forces.

According to Polish Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, the training will be conducted by instructors from allied NATO countries, with particular focus on modern drone technology.

— There is no other army in the world as well trained in drones and counter-drone systems as Ukraine’s, he claimed at the inauguration ceremony.

Around 250 Norwegian soldiers are already stationed at the site, and five rotations of 500 troops each are planned for next year. Estonia has also sent personnel, and more nations are expected to follow.

“Not a one-way street”

Kosiniak-Kamysz argued that the cooperation not only benefits Ukraine, but that the allied countries also benefit from Ukrainian combat experience.

— This is not a one-way street. An important element is that we will draw on Ukrainian experience. Right next to us is a drone launch strip, the defense minister said.

He emphasized that the base symbolizes NATO countries’ unity and claimed that “peace requires strength, skill, training, a well-prepared army, a strong alliance and resilient societies”.

On the same day as the inauguration, EU leaders agreed to create a so-called “drone wall” along the bloc’s eastern flank, following claims from Poland and Estonia about Russian airspace violations. Moscow has dismissed the accusations as groundless and accused the EU of trying to incite a war against Russia.

Hungary: Brussels prepares for war – and Europeans will pay the price

The new cold war

Published 2 October 2025
– By Editorial Staff
Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó sounds the alarm: EU leadership under Ursula von der Leyen is sacrificing Europe for Ukraine.
2 minute read

“Brussels is preparing for war and they want Europeans to pay the price”, writes Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó in a harsh attack against the EU’s new seven-year budget.

He warns that the union’s power holders are prioritizing Ukraine’s military over Europe’s own and very urgent problems.

In the post, published ahead of the informal EU summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, Szijjártó emphasized that Europe’s security and economic situation has deteriorated sharply as a result of failed decisions in Brussels.

“Brussels is preparing for war, and they want Europeans, including Hungarians, to pay the price. The proposed budget for the next seven years is much more about Ukraine than about the European Union itself”, wrote Szijjártó.

He described the draft as “a Ukraine budget”, focused on arming the country and keeping its state structure alive, while Europe’s own urgent needs are neglected. Instead, Brussels should address declining competitiveness, secure energy supply, and rebuild the foundations for European growth, he argued.

“But instead, the European Commission wants to send European taxpayers’ money – including Hungarians’ money – to Ukraine, to finance the Ukrainian state and military”, the minister warned.

Wants to see “patriotic shift”

Szijjártó emphasized that Hungary rejects the idea that the country’s citizens’ money should be used for war efforts.

“We don’t want Hungarian taxpayers’ money to be sent to Ukraine, we don’t want it to be spent on war, and we don’t want it to cover the arming and operation of the Ukrainian military”, Szijjártó explained further.

The minister concluded by stating that the EU can only change course if a “patriotic shift” occurs in Brussels.

“Until then, Brussels will remain committed to pro-war, pro-migration, and pro-gender policies. But we don’t want war, we don’t want migration, we don’t want gender madness, and we don’t want Hungarians’ money to be siphoned off to Ukraine”, he wrote.

The day before Szijjártó’s statement, on September 30, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán directed harsh criticism at Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk in a post on X.

“Dear Donald Tusk, You may think that you are at war with Russia, but Hungary is not. Neither is the European Union. You are playing a dangerous game with the lives and security of millions of Europeans. This is very bad!” Orbán emphasized.

Stoltenberg’s call: Sacrifice welfare to stop Putin

The war in Ukraine

Published 1 October 2025
– By Editorial Staff
Jens Stoltenberg meets Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
2 minute read

Norway’s finance minister and former NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg says that Western Europe must continue sending billions to Ukraine – even if this comes at the expense of citizens’ healthcare and welfare.

— I know that one additional billion to Ukraine or one billion extra to national defense is one billion less to other good purposes like health, education and infrastructure. But we must remember that the highest cost is to let Putin win, said Stoltenberg during the conference Warsaw Security Forum on Tuesday.

Stoltenberg, who led the US-led military alliance from 2014 to 2024, is now Norway’s finance minister and during the forum he revealed that Norway under his leadership has tripled military support to Ukraine and significantly increased its own defense spending.

His statements align with the military alliance’s current Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who has previously urged member countries to cut welfare in order to increase support to Kiev further.

Stoltenberg was NATO chief when the Ukraine conflict escalated into a full-scale war in February 2022. Even before the invasion, he had pushed for Ukrainian NATO membership and NATO-adapted infrastructure in the country – measures that according to Russia provoked the war.

“Starting to talk about a third world war”

After the 2022 invasion, Stoltenberg intensified demands that Ukraine should be admitted to the alliance and urged member countries to increase their military and financial support to the country.

Several Western European governments have dramatically increased their military spending over the past year, citing the alleged threat from Russia. At the same time, many European countries are struggling with strained welfare systems and demands for savings at home.

Moscow categorically denies plans to attack NATO or EU countries and claims that these allegations are used as a pretext to justify military investments at the expense of welfare.

— Some officials in NATO and the EU are beginning to seriously talk about a third world war as a potential scenario, warns Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, accusing the West of fueling anti-Russian hysteria.

Our independent journalism needs your support!
We appreciate all of your donations to keep us alive and running.

Our independent journalism needs your support!
Consider a donation.

You can donate any amount of your choosing, one-time payment or even monthly.
We appreciate all of your donations to keep us alive and running.

Dont miss another article!

Sign up for our newsletter today!

Take part of uncensored news – free from industry interests and political correctness from the Polaris of Enlightenment – every week.