Jeffrey Sachs on the roots of the Ukraine war
I am committing the breach of copying and pasting a part of Glenn Greenwald’s interview with economist Jeffrey Sachs, because I think it is so important that people see it who would not ordinarily be exposed to points of view in the alternative media, and who may even feel it is unsavory, kooky, or dangerous to go there.
Jeffrey Sachs is an insider turned class traitor, Davos man gone rogue, a fallen angel from the philanthropy–diplomacy empyrean, a whistleblower on neocon meddling. I can’t emphasize enough that he was there in 1989 and 1990 when one thing was said and another set of things began to be done.
Jeffrey Sachs: I posted a piece on Common Dreams, which people can take a look at, to gather a lot of hyperlinks and a lot of the underlying data and evidence but this story really goes back 34 years. It goes back to 1989, 1990, the U.S. and Germany were both very clear to Gorbachev – who was a godsend for the world, by the way, because he really was a man of peace, and I was profoundly honored to try to help him on the economic side, though, the White House was having none of it at the time – but in any event, Gorbachev believed in peace and he unilaterally disbanded the Warsaw Pact, which was the Soviet side NATO and Baker and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the German foreign minister, repeated, time and again, to Gorbachev, and in many, many different forms, and so did the NATO secretary general and others: “We will not move NATO one inch eastward. We won’t do it.”
I spoke to a wonderful historian who is working on this right now, who tells me that in the archives he’s come across, in 1992, not only the plans for NATO expansion, but Ukraine was already on the list for NATO expansion in 1992 when supposedly, in the public, there is no such thing as NATO expansion at all. But remember, in 1992, that was Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld in the Bush senior administration. I thought: what could be worse? Well, we kept learning things can get worse even. And then in the Democratic Party, the love affair with the so-called ‘liberal hegemony,’ I don’t know what the liberal part is, but I know what the hegemony part is. That has been Nuland’s thing. And of course, her husband, Robert Kagan’s thing, for decades. This has been underway since the early 1990s.
The Russians have been saying, and Gorbachev said, Don’t move eastward, we want peace, we want openness. I was actually an adviser to Gorbachev. I was an economic advisor to Yeltsin. I was an economic adviser to Leonid Kuchma, the first president of independent Ukraine. I’ve seen all of these people. Do you know what they wanted? They wanted normal life. They wanted to stop the Cold War. They did not want crazy things. They wanted normalcy and we wouldn’t give it – what we said: Normalcy? Yeah, that’s U.S. hegemony. That’s U.S. indispensable power. That’s the U.S. “We do what we want anywhere, we want when we want it.” And that has been the story all along. And frankly, I couldn’t imagine it at the time because I was watching with my own eyes as a young guy. Suddenly, the world had a chance for peace – and peace didn’t mean U.S. global hegemony, peace meant normal cooperation – but we couldn’t accept the deal of just being normal and cooperative. We had to say, “Now we lead” on everything. And that’s been the story since the beginning.
There are many steps to it. Clinton was the first violator of the promises, and Clinton was so inconsistent on everything. But this is one of the things he was inconsistent on. So, the first NATO expansion took place under Clinton and that was Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic; the next NATO expansion, seven countries by Bush Junior in 2004 – Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania and Bulgaria on the Black Sea. So, you had the Baltic states, you had Romania and Bulgaria. You’re starting to right up against Russia, Slovakia and Slovenia.
Putin says, in 2007, stop, already, “Stop,” he says it in a famous speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. We don’t listen at all. 2008, Bush says “NATO is going to enlarge to Ukraine.” The European leaders, by the way, were aghast, and one of the European top leaders at the time called me, and said, What is your president doing? Of course, European leaders don’t say any of this publicly, but they say it privately, “This is crazy.” “This is so dangerous.” But of course, they were quiet. Bush pushed this through in 2008.
Then there was a reprieve for Ukraine. The reprieve was that the president, Viktor Yanukovych, said, look, we’re in between two giants. We don’t want to be smashed in the middle. We take neutrality. But neutrality was a red flag for Victoria Nuland and her friends. And so, at the end of 2013, when demonstrations against the decision that Yanukovych had made to postpone signing an agreement with the EU started protests, believe me, the U.S., covertly and overtly in every other way, stirred that up massively. But in January and February 2014, they supported a violent insurrection that overthrew Yanukovych. And of course, notoriously Nuland was caught on tape, something we don’t talk about. But anyone go listen to it! […]
G. Greenwald: She picked the next leader! She picked the new leadership.
Jeffrey Sachs: She’s planning the government weeks before the overthrow, calling exactly who would be the prime minister, by the way. It’s amazing. But the whole thing is amnesia – Don’t talk about any of this, though it’s so obvious!
I had a weird experience personally, which was that when the government was overthrown and Yanukovych fled and Yatsenyuk was prime minister, just as Nuland said, I got a call: ‘Yatsenyuk wants to meet you. It’s a deep economic crisis.’ Okay. You know, I actually respond to those things when a government says we’re in a very deep financial crisis. So, I flew to Kyiv and I had an NGO brag to me about the role they played in the overthrow. And it was ugly. It left me shaking, you know, the kind of thing you just want to wash off. Don’t tell me this awful stuff, you had no business being part of a violent insurrection, but that’s the role we played. I went home. I didn’t go back. I was disgusted by the whole thing. But it was obvious then we were on a path toward war. This didn’t start with an “unprovoked invasion” on February 24, 2022. This started in February 2014 and it started with the U.S. participation in a coup.
Ambiance 