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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.

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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Zelensky’s call: “Give us nuclear weapons”

The war in Ukraine

Published yesterday 11:09
– By Editorial Staff
Zelensky has repeatedly expressed regret that Ukraine has no nuclear arsenal.

Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky wants the West to provide Kiev with nuclear weapons and even more missiles “to stop Russia” if Ukraine is not granted membership of the NATO military pact very quickly.

British journalist Piers Morgan published an excerpt from an interview with Zelensky in which he asked the Ukrainian leader why Kiev refuses to provide any alternative to NATO membership for possible peace negotiations, when he knows that such a proposal is considered completely unacceptable to Moscow.

The Ukrainian president replied that if Kiev is prevented from joining the US-led bloc in the near future, Ukraine will have the right to ask its allies how to defend itself against Russia instead.

– Which support package? Which missiles? Will we be given nuclear weapons? Then let them give us nuclear weapons!

Give us back nuclear arms. Give us missile systems. Partners, help us finance the one-million army, move your contingent on the parts of our state where we want the stability of the situation, he continued.

“A maniac”

In recent months, Mr. Zelensky has repeatedly expressed his regret that Ukraine had previously handed over Soviet nuclear weapons stationed on its soil in exchange for security guarantees. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine inherited some 1 700 nuclear warheads, which remained under Moscow’s operational control.

Russia has always maintained that Ukraine never had any nuclear weapons to begin with, as the Soviet assets legally belonged to Moscow.

– Zelensky’s latest statements that he wants to possess a nuclear capability expose him as a maniac, who considers the planet as an object for his sick delusions. They also prove that for him nuclear power stations are not a source of peaceful energy, but a dirty weapon that the Kiev regime needs for blackmail, comments Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova.

Trump wants Ukraine’s minerals in return for support

The war in Ukraine

Published 5 February 2025
– By Editorial Staff

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, President Donald Trump declared that he wants a “deal” with Ukraine to gain access to the country’s rare metal resources for continued US support in its war against Russia.

Trump referred to the fact that the US has sent more military and economic aid to Ukraine than its European allies, adding, according to AP and Reuters.

We’re looking to do a deal with Ukraine where they’re going to secure what we’re giving them with their rare earths and other things, the US president explained.

Trump indicated that he has been told by the Ukrainian government that, among other things, they would be willing to give the US access to the minerals that are “critical to the modern high-tech economy”.

– We’re putting in hundreds of billions of dollars. They have great rare earth. And I want security of the rare earth, and they’re willing to do it.

“Going to stop that ridiculous war”

Trump has previously said he would bring an end to the war within 24 hours of taking office and insisted that talks are indeed underway to end the conflict, claims dismissed by Russian sources.

We made a lot of progress on Russia, Ukraine, Trump said.

– We’ll see what happens. We’re going to stop that ridiculous war, the President continued.

Trump’s call for “compensation” has been met with criticism from other Western bloc countries, with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, referring to a meeting with other EU leaders, saying that “it would be very selfish” and that such resources would be better used for the country’s post-war reconstruction.

EU may resume Russian gas imports

The war in Ukraine

Published 31 January 2025
– By Editorial Staff

The possibility of resuming Russian gas imports via pipelines could be part of a potential peace deal with Russia, according to the Financial Times. Proposals backed by Germany and Hungary, among others, would aim to lower energy prices in Europe while bringing Moscow to the negotiating table.

There is pressure from some big member states on energy prices and this is one way to bring those down, of course, what is described as an anonymous EU official told the Financial Times.

The idea, meanwhile, is facing strong criticism in some quarters, including concerns in Brussels that a resumption of imports would increase Russia’s export revenues and counter previous efforts to reduce dependence on Russian energy.

From 40 to 10 percent

The EU’s direct gas imports from Russia have fallen dramatically since the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022. Before the war, Russian gas accounted for around 40% of the EU’s total gas supply, but in 2024 this share has dropped to around 10% as a result of sanctions, diversification of energy sources and the Nord Stream pipeline terror attack.

To compensate for the shortfall, the EU has increased imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG), particularly from the United States and Norway, while imports of liquefied gas also from Russia have increased through gaps still left in the sanctions.

Overall, the situation has led to a sharp increase in energy prices in Europe and has had a very negative impact on the European economy, with the EU’s largest economy Germany, for example, experiencing economic contraction for two years in a row.

In the end, everybody wants lower energy costs, said a senior EU official, according to the Financial Times.

Growing opposition

Some EU countries, such as Slovakia and Hungary, have expressed open concern about their energy supply, arguing that the political leadership in Ukraine has jeopardized their energy security by stopping gas transfers through the country from Russia.

In Germany, the leader of the opposition party Alternative for Germany, Alice Weidel, recently pledged to restart the Nord Stream project if the party comes to power.

Sweden donates new major package to Ukraine

The war in Ukraine

Published 31 January 2025
– By Editorial Staff
Minister of Defense Pål Jonson.

Swedish production of military equipment will be included in the next aid package to Ukraine. The package will be the largest to date and amounts to a total of SEK 13.5 billion (€1.2 billion).

The Government and the Sweden Democrats have presented the 18th aid package to Ukraine, where Sweden will now procure military equipment specifically intended for donation to the country. For example, €90 million is set aside to manufacture long-range missiles and long-range drones.

We are moving from donation to production, said Pål Jonson (M) at a press conference on Thursday.

Approximately €500 million will be used for procurement from Swedish and foreign defense industry, €250 million will be donated and a further €250 million will be donated from existing equipment from the Swedish Armed Forces, including 146 trucks, 16 combat boats, 1,500 TOW anti-tank missiles and 2,000 anti-tank shells. Sweden will also provide extensive training.

In total, Sweden’s military support to the Ukrainian war now amounts to approximately SEK 61.9 billion (€5.5 billion), which is roughly equivalent to the entire annual expenditure of the state budget on pensions. Previously, Sweden has donated aircraft, armored vehicles, missiles and artillery shells.