Prof Jeffrey Sachs posted a Youtube video about American meddling in Ukraine
(Save Ukraine From American Meddling | Jeffrey Sachs, June 27, 2024 Neutrality Studies )
( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3aa12ISDXY&lc=UgwHqT0dbJgcd4ncZnN4AaABAg.A5LlQpXfiqzA5TUVJgPBvj )
and I found it to be excellent and posted an enthusiastic comment that I was pleased to see it and could use it in the future to inform people and found it accurate and comprehensive.
An onlooker posted a reply to me that I was all wrong. Saying it was ‘Far from accurate and far from comprehensive’.
We exchanged a couple more emails and finally he (joe_ninety_one_5076) posted his itemised critique of Sachs video and I looked at it and found it unconvincing.
Because my response was too big Youtube would not let me post it. So I am posting it here and I’ll simply post a link to this on Youtube.
Here it is. It includes the transcript of Sach’s video:
@joe_ninety_one_5076
Well I am disappointed. The whole question here is American meddling in ‘Ukraine’. Subsumed beneath that is the corollary: the damage it has done is doing and will do to ‘Ukraine’. Meaning today of course, in popular common use, even official use: ‘Kiev Ukraine’, the American owned puppet.
But which we can more properly see as the ‘original’ ‘Ukraine’ of some 40 million people that has been irrevocable smashed forever by US meddling.
Smashed though it is we can still use the notion, the idea, of the overall landmass and its peoples and contemplate how it suffers, has suffered and will suffer.
It is up to the onlooker I guess, to see the word ‘Ukraine’ as meaning whichever he chooses.
For me it is very noticeable that all the warmongers and most vociferous supporters of ‘Ukraine’ do not mean the ‘whole’ as was and nor to they even mean the ‘Kiev Ukrainians’, the people who remain there, who still are.
We see this because they happily watch 500,000 of their own die in the course of this attempt to subjugate their own brothers. Vivid example.
But even more vivid, more lurid is their battle cry: ‘To the last man’. Pray tell how does it profit a people if they all die?
It does not. It is sheer abject lunacy to imagine that it does. Unless we histrionically postulate some other fate ‘worse than death’ – perpetual slavery beneath Roman legions or Attila the Hun or Ghenghis Khan or the American South slave owners perhaps.
There is no such histrionic fate worse than death facing anyone in Ukraine.
No. It makes sense only in one way: If all the people die but the regime, the rulers, live on THEN you/they could claim ‘victory’. But as I say, that is a victory not for the people. It is a victory that takes no account of the people whatever.
I just wanted to establish that fact. It is a sore point with me. I am disgusted at the way all the media perpetuate this loose language that masks genocide in fact.
Right. Now back the topic. The question is of American meddling. If you disagree with Sach’s video you disagree with his contention that American meddling brought this about and maintains it. A seemingly impossible position to take in light of all we see sand know but that’s what awakened my interest. Can such a position be supported? What new evidence, details, understandings are there?
You come up with these:
- Sachs cites some neocon document in 2000. He could cite Dugin’s 1995 book, ‘Foundations of Geopolitics’, influential in Kremlin neocon circles, requiring, amongst other things, the annexation of Ukraine, dismemberment and vassalage of Georgia, vasalage of Belarus …
- Ukraine was neutral in 2014 when Putin invaded, with little prospect of NATO membership. An inconvenient truth.
- China/Russia in Mexico is a flawed analogy. NATO is not an authoritarian dictatorship.
- The US spent money on democracy in Ukraine. So what? Ukraine has been the shining light of post-soviet democracy. Sachs does not say how much Russia has spent on trying to undermine it. The US is open; Russian affairs are closed. Who poisoned pro-western candidate Yushchenko in 2004?
- The timeline of Maidan is abbreviated. He misses out the cause, which was Russian pressure to prevent Ukraine signing a free trade deal with the EU. He also misses out the violence used by the government which caused the protests to escalate. Finally he misses out the final deal, brokered by the EU, that the Russian delegate refused to sign. Yanukovych fled while still in control of the police and army. It was parliament that removed him.
- The Nuland phone call was not about who should be in the new Ukrainian government after Yanukovich. The text of the call demonstrates this clearly. This failing alone shows Sachs to be either disingenuous or an uncritical amateur. The release of this tape actually highlights rather well Kremlin bad faith.
- He entirely omits the immediate calling of elections by the provisional government. He entirely omits the Kremlin’s unprovoked invasion of Crimea after the Russian governor of Crimea had recognised the provisional government. He omits to mention that Donbas did not spontaneously break away in 2014. It was engineered in the Kremlin. The provisional government was justified in responding.
- Sachs deliberately misinterprets Merkel’s comments on Minsk and avoids discussing Russian bad faith.
- In December 2021, the US simply reminded Russia that Ukraine was a sovereign state. Russia had previously agreed this on many occasions.
- He fails to add that Bennett also said that Bucha destroyed the peace talks after the ‘SMO’ started.
- He keeps talking about US missiles in Ukraine as a done deal, even though the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997 forbids nuclear missiles in new NATO states. He is completely unaware of this treaty.
Sachs is VERY biased. He was a top advisor to the Kremlin in 1991 and presided over the subsequent chaos. Perhaps he is trying to make amends.
My take goes something like this:
- irrelevant
- ‘legally’ neutral in fact bellicose about to mount an invasion
- irrelevant
- the devil is in the detail
- I am not qualified to pronounce
- Not qualified to pronounce but strong feelings I’ve seen proof to the contrary.
- wholly debatable all postulates without evidence
- I don’t know.
- I don’t know and from here can’t see that it would matter
- We well know the letter of the law when written by the west means nothing.
Overall I totally fail to see how you have demonstrated that the USA has not and does not and will not interfere with Ukrainian (either ‘the regime’, or the ‘kiev ukrainians’, or the ‘donbas ukrainians’, or the ‘whole thing as was’) politics and wellbeing to their detriment. Clearly not the faintest whisper of anything relevant to the deaths of 500,000 mean in the process of trying to subjugate their brothers.
But then, Sachs doesn’t say much about this, either. But what Sachs does say is potent and true I believe and I think perhaps you need reminding of it and perhaps many people need reminding of it. I do not much agree with today’s modus operandi: i.e. the video. For I believe we gain fleeting impressions and act upon them. Text takes a little more effort and perhaps is not so appealing but it is much more reliable and useful.
So here is the text of what Sachs said. FYI and anyone else interested: (please excuse my poor editing)
Save Ukraine from American meddling the hill June 27
2024 Ukraine can only be saved at the negotiating table not on the battlefield sadly this point is not understood by Ukrainian politicians such as Oleg Dunda a member of Ukraine’s Parliament who recently wrote an oped on this site against my repeated call for negotiations
Dunda believes that the United States will save Ukraine from Russia the opposite is true Ukraine actually needs to be saved from the United States
Ukraine epitomizes Henry Kissinger’s famous aphorism quote it may be dangerous to be America’s enemy but to be America’s friend is fatal unquote
30 years ago Ukraine was embraced by American neoconservatives who believed that it was the perfect instrument for weakening Russia the neocons are the ideal ological Believers in American hegemony
that is the right and responsibility of the United States to be the world’s sole superpower and Global policemen as described for example in the project for a new American centuries 2000 report rebuilding America’s defenses
The neocons choose three methods to push US power and influence into Ukraine
First meddle in Ukraine’s internal politics second expand NATO to Ukraine despite Russia’s red line and third arm Ukraine and apply economic sanctions to defeat Russia
The neocons whispered a sweet fantasy into Ukraine’s ear back in the 1990s “Come with us into the Glorious Paradise of NATO land and you’ll be safe Ever After.” “
pro-european Ukrainian politicians especially in Western Ukraine loved the story they believed that Ukraine would join NATO just as Poland Hungary and the Czech Republic had in 1999
The idea of expanding NATO to Ukraine was fatuous and dangerous.
From Russia’s perspective the NATO expansion into Central Europe in 1999 was deeply objectionable and a stark violation of the solemn us promise that NATO would not expand quote 1 in Eastward end quote.
But it was not deadly to Russia’s interests those countries do not border the Russian Mainland NATO
Enlargement to Ukraine however would mean the loss of Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet at Sevastopel and the prospect of us missiles minutes from the Russian Mainland
There was in fact no prospect that Russia would ever accept NATO enlargement to Ukraine
The current CIA director William Burns said as much in a memo to Secretary of State Condalisa Rice when he was US ambassador to Moscow in 2008 the memo was famously entitled nyet means nyet
Burns wrote quote Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian Elite not just Putin. In more than 2 and A2 years of conversations with key Russian players from knuckle draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics I (that is: Burns) have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine and NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russia’s interests end quote
The neoconservatives never described this Russian red line to the American or Global public then or now.
Senior diplomats and Scholars in the United States had reached the same conclusion about NATO enlargement more generally in the 1990s as has been recently documented in detail
Ukrainians and their supporters insist that Ukraine has quote the right end quote to join NATO. The US also says so repeatedly. NATO’s policy says that NATO enlargement is an issue between NATO and the candidate country and that it is no business of Russia or any other non NATO country. This is preposterous.
I’ll start to believe that claim when Admiral John Kirby declares from the White House Podium that Mexico has the quote right to invite China and Russia to put military bases along the Rio Grande based on the same quote open door policy as NATO.
The Monroe Doctrine has said just the opposite for two centuries.
So Ukraine was set up for Disaster by the neocons actually the Ukrainian public sensed the truth and overwhelmingly opposed NATO membership until the 2014 Uprising that overthrew Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovich
Let’s retrace the chronology of this shockingly misguided American policy.
In the early 2000s the US began to meddle intensively in Ukraine’s Politics.
The US spent billions of dollars according to Victoria Nuland to build Ukraine’s quote democracy. Meaning to turn Ukraine to the United States and away from Russia even
so the Ukrainian public remained strongly against NATO membership and elected Victor Yanukovich who championed Ukrainian neutrality in 2010.
In February 2014 the Obama team actively sided with Neo-Nazi paramilitaries which stormed government buildings on February 21st and overthrew Yanukovich.
The next day cloaked as a quote revolution of dignity the us immediately recognized the new government. The astounding intercepted call between newand and US ambassador to Ukraine Jeffrey Pat where they talk about who should be in the new Ukrainian government several weeks before the Rebellion demonstrates the level of American involvement.
The post-uprising government in Ukraine was filled with Russia haters and was backed by extremist right-wing paramilitaries like the Azov Brigade.
When the ethnically Russian donbas region broke away from the uprising the central government aimed to retake the region by force.
A peace agreement was reached between keev and the donbas in 2015 known as Minsk 2 that would end the fighting by extending autonomy to the ethnically Russian regions of Donetsk and lugansk.
Alas Ukraine and the US undermined the treaty even while publicly endorsing it. The treaty was a mere temporizing measure according to German Chancellor Angela Merkel to give Ukraine time to build its Army.
The US shipped armaments to Ukraine to build up its military make it interoperable with NATO and support the retaking of the Donbas by force.
The next diplomatic opportunity to save Ukraine came in December 2021 When Vladimir Putin proposed a US Russia treaty on security guarantees calling for an end to Nato enlargement among other issues including the urgent question of US missile placements near Russia.
Instead of negotiating Biden again flatly said no to Putin on the question of ending NATO enlargement.
Yet another diplomatic opportunity to save Ukraine arose in March 2022 just days after the start of Russia’s special military operation launched on February 24.
Russia said that it would stop the war if Ukraine would agree to neutrality. Zelinsky agreed, documents were exchanged and a peace deal was nearly reached yet according to former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett the Us and other NATO allies notably the UK stepped in to block the agreement telling Ukraine to fight on.
Recently Boris Johnson said that Ukraine should keep fighting to preserve quote Western hegemony end quote.
Ukraine can still be saved through neutrality even as hundreds of thousands of lives have been squandered by the failure to negotiate.
The rest of the issues including boundaries can also be resolved through diplomacy.
The Killing can end now before more disasters befall Ukraine and the World.
As for the United States 30 years of neoconservative misrule is long enough
End.
Actually I overlooked the fact that there is a link to the text at thehill.com which would be a better place to see it. I will leave all this here out of laziness and because it has my comments in it.
But here is the ‘official’ text: https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4741597-save-ukraine-from-american-meddling/