Succinct Discussion of What Triggered War in Ukraine

Posted on: March 20, 2024 at 07:15:22 CT

Great overview by Jeffrey Sachs, public policy analyst and professor at Columbia University.

“Well, I think the mistake is that Ukraine should have been a neutral buffer between Russia and NATO. And that's how it started out as an independent state in 1991.

And the United States had its eye on getting Ukraine into the US orbit already from 1992. Zbigniew Brzezinski spelled it out in 1997. Many people thought this was a path to disaster and it's turned out to be a path to disaster. So it's very sad. It could have been peaceful and neutral and independent, and that wasn't good enough for the United States.

And I understand completely why Russia wouldn't want NATO on the 2000 km border of Ukraine and Russia. So it's just very sad, very predictable. George Kennan called it exactly in 1997. Interestingly, our current CIA director, Bill Burns, who was in 2008, the US ambassador to Russia, sent back a famous memo called Niet means Niet. No, don't do it.

And we should have been prudent, but we're not very prudent. We had our designs and we have walked into a disaster. But more than that, we talked Ukraine into a complete disaster. I mean, the other way of looking at this is that Ukraine wanted to be a sovereign, democratic country after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

The real screw up by the US was not just pushing NATO, but playing real games and participating in the overthrow of Yanukovych in February 2014. We overthrew a government and the United States played a major role in that. I happened to see some of it firsthand. Pretty ugly, but pretty standard stuff. This is what the US does when it doesn't like a government or a government standing in the way. It stirs things up. It puts in a lot of money, it funds unrest, it stokes unrest. And it did that in February 2014.

That was really the huge mistake that was a gambit, a typical so called covert, but not very covert US regime change operation. And it was absolutely the path to the disaster that we're in right now.

So I think the main point is you have two sides playing a lot of games. But for the United States to be pushing so hard to Russia's border was absolutely premeditated and stupid, really stupid. It got us into this mess, and you could see it coming so clearly for the last ten years.

What is your view of I begged the White House many times, avoid the war, stop. Just tell them NATO is not coming, Ukraine will do just fine. And they wouldn't do it because this has been a 30 year project of the United States also. This is how it works. This has been a long standing game, announced and explained. Brzezinski laid it all out for us in 1997.”

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