These are the comments of a man with a very unique perspective, a man who served as an economic advisor (in succession) to Soviet, Russian and Ukrainian presidents.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, is an “American economist, academic, public policy analyst, and former director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, where he holds the title of University Professor. He is known for his work on sustainable development, economic development, and the fight to end poverty.” 

The following comments by Professor Sachs were made as part of his introduction to the Oxford Pakistan Program Lecture, “The Geopolitics Of a Changing World.”

I have been thinking a lot about the Ukraine war, and I am very concerned. This is a war that is extraordinarily dangerous and should never have happened (see the Addendum). This is not simply a war that Putin decided to launch, unprovoked, on February 24, 2022. That is nonsense for anyone who has been around. I was an adviser to President Mikhail Gorbachev; I was an advisor to President Boris Yeltsin; I was an advisor to President Leonid Kuchma, the first president of independent Ukraine; and to others. What you’re being told about this conflict and others is simply not true. I say that based on firsthand experience of more than 30 years.

What follows is the complete addendum to his lecture (to which he referred above). In this addendum he explains the true facts and history of the Ukraine war, which actually began in 2014 following the US-sponsored overthrow of the democratically-elected Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. He also explains his unique perspective on that conflict, arising from his role as advisor to the “economic teams of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma.”

Addendum on the  war in Ukraine:

I have seen a lot of the history of the conflict in Ukraine firsthand, going back 30 years. This is a provoked war because the United States acted in a way that Russian leaders understandably viewed as deeply threatening to Russia’s security.

Mikhail Gorbachev unilaterally disbanded the Warsaw Pact military alliance of the Soviet Union and sought peace between the Soviet Union with United States and Europe. This was an unimaginable dream, but it happened. I attribute a great deal of it not to the Soviet Union’s weakness or need for reform, though that was undoubted, but to the extraordinary decency of Gorbachev and his search for a peaceful way forward. Here is a case where a leader made a decisive difference for peace.

As Gorbachev made his move towards peace, the United States and Germany (which was interested in German reunification) made very clear to Gorbachev that the West would not take advantage of the Soviet’s unilateral action by expanding the NATO alliance eastward. US neoconservatives, however, took a different view. Starting in 1992, after the demise of the Soviet Union, the neoconservatives, now in charge of US foreign policy, took the view that the US was now the only superpower and could do what it wanted. More specifically, the US should aim to be the global hegemon.

The authors of this unilateral strategy were from both political parties. In the Republican Party, these included Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld; in the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton, Victoria Nuland, President Biden, and others. The doctrine of neoconservatism is also the doctrine of US exceptionalism and US unipolarity (that is, the US as the world’s sole superpower). The neoconservative aim is dominance, what is sometimes called “full-spectrum dominance,” meaning military, technological, and economic dominance in every major region of the world.

In the mid 1990s, there was a huge fight inside the US government between those who said that NATO should not be expanded as that would wreck relations with Russia, and those who said that the US should do what it wants. In the end, Bill Clinton followed the “we do what we want” school of thought, and the first NATO expansion took place, to Poland, Czechia, and Hungary. That raised tensions with Russia, and one of the greatest statesmen and scholars of US-Russian relations in our modern history, George Kennan, said in 1997 that this would lead disastrously to a new Cold War. The Secretary of Defense at the time, Bill Perry, thought about resigning in protest he was so upset with the decision to expand NATO because he regarded it as a basic violation of promises as well as a basic provocation to Russia.

The first expansion was taken badly by Russia, but it did not lead to this war. The next step was in 1999, when for a variety of reasons, NATO bombed Serbia 48 straight days to break Serbia and to break Kosovo out of Serbia. This intervention was unacceptable in my opinion, and in violation of the UN Charter. It was also the first major war in Europe since World War II (not the Ukraine war as we are often told). The US took aim at Russia’s close ally. That raised the temperature even higher.

Then came 9/11. President Putin immediately offered help and cooperation to the United States, showing that cooperation between the two sides was indeed still possible. Yet the US quickly made a few terrible decisions. First, the United States unilaterally walked out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002. This was seen as a direct threat to Russia because it meant the possibility of the United States looking for first-strike capability against Russia. Then in 2003, the US launched the unprovoked Iraq War on false pretenses and phony intelligence. Again, that raised temperatures further. In 2004, the United States expanded NATO seven times, to Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Slovenia. This was like the water rising around Russia: the bombing of Serbia, the ABM Treaty withdrawal, NATO expansion to the Black Sea and the Baltics. Finally, in 2007 at the Munich Security Summit, Putin warned the US to stop, as the US was crossing Russia’s red lines.

In 2008, the US announced that NATO would expand to Ukraine and to Georgia. The clear, if unstated, goal was to surround Russia in the Black Sea region: Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia would all be NATO members. Russia would no longer be able to project power in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East.

At the time, European leaders said to me privately, “What is your president doing? This is completely reckless.” Of course, European leaders don’t say this publicly. This is part of the deception that goes on. 2008 was a watershed moment, a breakdown of cooperation. One of the results of the push of NATO to Georgia was the Russo-Georgian War. Even then, US policy makers refused to heed Russia’s red lines.

In 2011-12, President Obama instructed the CIA and other parts of the U.S. government to work with regional powers in the Middle East to overthrow Bashar Al Assad in Syria. This was yet another US regime change operation. There would have been no Syrian War but for the United States. In 2012, the UN negotiated an end to the Syrian war, but the UN initiative was rejected by one country – the United States – because the US insisted that Assad must go in any peace deal. You will not find this in the media, because by 2012 the mainstream media had stopped reporting inconvenient truths.

In 2014, the United States helped to overthrow the Ukrainian government. We can even listen to the February 6 tape of Victoria Nuland, then the Assistant Secretary of State, speaking to the US ambassador in Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, about the formation of the new government that would come to power through a coup two weeks later.

The United States helped to pay for the Maidan protests. The evidence suggests that the violence, including shooting into the crowds, came largely from the protestor side, not from the security forces of Yanukovych. These were indeed the first shots of the Ukraine war, as part of a US-supported overthrow of the Ukrainian government.

What was Yanukovych doing in 2013 that was so upsetting to the US? He was pursuing neutrality. He was against NATO enlargement. The US helped to overthrow the government and then immediately backed a Russophobic, highly nationalistic government that came into power the next day. The new government quickly dropped neutrality and even passed a law outlawing the Russian language, though the law was not implemented.

A few weeks later, Russia retook Crimea, and many pro-Russian forces in the Ukrainian military broke away from the Ukrainian military and started an insurrection in Eastern Ukraine (the Donbas). The United States sent billions of dollars of weapons to Ukraine during the 2014-2021 to build and modernize Ukraine’s army, which is why Ukraine’s army could so effectively fight during this past year. The fortifications and the heavy armaments were funded by billions of dollars in support of the antiRussian regime that the US had helped bring to power.

None of this history is recounted in our media, in our politics, or in our public discussion. Our mainstream media say that the war was wholly unprovoked and was launched because an evil and delusional Vladimir Putin believes he is Peter the Great. In fact, the war has causes dating back 30 years. The United States should not have tried to move its military alliance right up to Russia’s borders.

At the end of 2021, President Putin put forth three demands. The first was Ukraine’s neutrality; the second was that Crimea should remain a part of Russia, as Crimea has been the home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet since 1783; and the third was that the Minsk II agreement should be implemented as Europe and Ukraine had promised, but then reneged upon. Yet the Biden Administration refused to negotiate.

I do not mean to justify the invasion and the killing, but to help understand it. Most importantly, we should understand that there is a way for this war to end. The way for this war to end, in my view, is for President Biden to pick up the phone and tell President Putin that NATO will not expand to Ukraine, and in return Russia should end the war and withdraw the military. Of course, there are many other issues, but NATO enlargement is at the center.

Most world leaders believe this is a war of NATO expansion. They believe, as I do, that this is a US-Russia proxy war. If it is not, then the United States should prove it quickly and clearly, by stating publicly that NATO expansion is off the table as part of an overall peace agreement

READ THE TRANSCRIPT OF THE FULL LECTURE HERE

WATCH THE VIDEO OF THE FULL LECTURE HERE