Saturday, July 12, 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.

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Ukraine reports record civilian casualties in June

The war in Ukraine

Published yesterday 7:27
– By Editorial Staff
The number of civilian casualties continues to rise on both sides in the Ukraine war. The image shows victims of a Russian shelling attack against the Kharkiv region in northeastern Ukraine in June this year.
3 minute read

The number of civilian casualties in Ukraine reached its highest level since 2022 during June 2025, according to a new report from the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in the country. At least 232 civilians were killed and 1,343 injured during the month – figures that testify to a dramatic escalation in how the war affects the civilian population.

The UN report shows that Russia conducted 10 times more missile attacks during June 2025 compared to the same month the previous year. The attacks hit 16 regions in Ukraine, including the capital Kiev, and caused deaths and injuries far from the front lines.

“Civilians across Ukraine are facing levels of suffering we have not seen in over three years”, says Danielle Bell, head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine.

According to the report, almost half of all civilian casualties were caused by missiles and aerial bombs in densely populated areas. Meanwhile, short-range drone attacks continued to kill and injure civilians near the front lines.

Targets of the Russian attacks

Based on reports from the conflict, Russian attacks primarily target energy infrastructure such as power plants, gas storage facilities, and power lines. Russia has systematically attacked Ukraine’s energy supply in an attempt to paralyze the country, with over 2,400 attacks on energy facilities since February 2022.

Military recruitment centers and other strategic targets have also been subject to Russian attacks. The Russian Defense Ministry often justifies attacks on energy and fuel facilities by claiming they are used by the Ukrainian military.

Despite these facilities potentially having military significance, the civilian population is severely affected when they are attacked. Civilian casualties occur both from direct hits and from debris from downed missiles when Ukrainian air defenses respond.

Several of the civilian deaths have occurred in nighttime attacks on the capital Kiev, where attacks were previously uncommon. During massive attacks during the night against Thursday in the Kiev region that lasted almost ten hours, Russian forces used 397 Shahed drones and 18 missiles against Ukrainian targets. At least two people were killed and 22 injured in that attack on Kyiv.

Woman who became a victim of heavy Russian bombing in northeastern Ukraine on June 7 this year.

Sharp increase during 2025

The total number of civilian deaths and injuries during the first half of 2025 is 6,754 people, which is 54 percent more compared to the same period in 2024. During the first six months of 2025, the number of civilian deaths increased by 17 percent and injuries by 64 percent.

Since the war broke out on February 24, 2022, the UN monitoring mission has registered at least 13,580 civilian deaths, including 716 children. Additionally, 34,115 injured civilians were reported, including 2,173 children.

The UN monitoring mission warns that the actual figures for civilian casualties may be significantly higher than what is reported, given the challenges and time required for adequate verification of all deaths and injuries.

“No place in Ukraine is completely safe”

Danielle Bell from the UN monitoring mission has previously warned: “Almost half of the civilian casualties over the past three months have died far away from the front lines. We can conclude that no place in Ukraine is completely safe”.

No peace is yet in sight in the over three-year-long armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine that continues with Western involvement.

Russia now allows foreigners in the military

The war in Ukraine

Published 10 July 2025
– By Editorial Staff
Vladimir Putin with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic.
1 minute read

Non-Russian citizens will now be allowed to enlist in the military, according to a law signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The state-run Russian news agency Tass reports that the new law enables stateless persons and foreigners to sign contracts and serve in the Russian military until the end of the mobilization period, the lifting of the state of emergency, or the end of martial law in Russia.

The law is said to have been expedited “in order to take urgent additional measures to restaff the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation” according to the explanation in the legal document.

Slovakia urges West to engage in dialogue with Russia

The new cold war

Published 2 July 2025
– By Editorial Staff
Slovak Deputy Prime Minister Juraj Blanar believes that Western leaders must use diplomacy and dialogue to end the war.
2 minute read

Slovakia’s Foreign Minister Juraj Blanar believes that the war in Ukraine cannot be decided on the battlefield. Instead, he urges the Western world to seek a peaceful solution through direct dialogue with Russia – and warns that continued tensions could lead to a catastrophic large-scale war between NATO and Moscow.

– We do not want a war between Russia and NATO to break out, because that would be the Third World War. We want the conflict to be settled peacefully, Blanar said during a discussion program on Slovak public broadcaster STVR last Sunday.

Blanar emphasized the importance of diplomacy and called for a return to “respect for international law”. He also suggested that the Western world should seek ways to renew contact with Moscow – “and perhaps even forgive everything that has happened”.

Slovakia, like Hungary, has consistently pushed for de-escalation of the conflict and opposed additional EU sanctions against Russia.

The country’s president Peter Pellegrini has also urged EU member states to resume direct talks with Moscow and has simultaneously rejected demands for rapid military buildup within NATO, arguing that defense spending should reflect each country’s own priorities – rather than concerns about Russia.

Russia demands Ukrainian neutrality

Russian officials have condemned the US-led bloc’s decision last week that member countries should raise their defense budgets to 5 percent of GDP – a measure that NATO says will deter the “long-term threat posed by Russia to Euro-Atlantic security”.

The Kremlin has repeatedly stated that it has no intentions of attacking any NATO country and has called the accusations “nonsense” – a scare tactic that, according to Moscow, is used by the West to legitimize increased defense spending.

Moscow states that it seeks a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine war, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that a lasting agreement must include recognition of the actual situation “on the ground”, as well as Ukrainian neutrality.

According to Putin, contacts between Moscow and Kyiv are being maintained regarding a possible third round of peace negotiations. Previous talks have been held in Turkey, where the parties have exchanged draft peace proposals and carried out several prisoner exchanges.

Majority of Ukrainians want peace through compromise

The war in Ukraine

Published 1 July 2025
– By Editorial Staff
It was previously often claimed that Russia would be defeated on the battlefield - today the picture is different, and more voices are advocating for peace through negotiations instead.
2 minute read

A majority of Ukraine’s population now indicates they are willing to accept compromises or make concessions to end the war with Russia.

This is shown in a new opinion poll conducted by the Ukrainian think tank Janus Institute for Strategic Studies and Forecasts, the polling institute SOCIS Centre for Social and Marketing Research, and the publication Barometer of Public Opinion, which compiles and disseminates opinion data.

According to the survey, 55.7 percent of respondents now support a solution through compromise with the involvement of international leaders. An additional 16.6 percent advocate for a temporary freezing of the war, with a ceasefire along the current line of contact.

Photo: facsimile/socis.kiev.ua

In total, this means that over 70 percent of respondents are open to some form of settlement or pause in the hostilities.

Meanwhile, 12.8 percent want to continue the war until Ukraine’s borders from 1991 are restored, while 8.6 percent indicate they prefer continued fighting until the borders from February 23, 2022 – the day before the Russian invasion began – are restored.

1.2 percent chose another option, and 5 percent of respondents refused to answer or could not take a position.

Photo: facsimile/socis.kiev.ua

The survey also shows that 57.6 percent believe elections should be held in Ukraine if peace negotiations with Russia lead to a temporary cessation of hostilities and an end to the state of war.

The opinion poll was conducted between June 6-11, 2025, and included 2,000 respondents aged 18 and older who were interviewed in person across Ukraine. The survey did not include residents in temporarily occupied areas or in areas where active fighting was ongoing at the time of data collection. The statistical margin of error is stated as ±2.6 percent.

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