Professor Jeffrey Sachs, President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, shares his thoughts on the origins of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in the course of his interview with Tucker Carson:
The idea of American unipolarity sums up to this: “We run the world. We are the hegemon. We are the sole superpower. We are unchallenged.”
NATO’s expansion to the East was based on a long-term U.S. geostrategy. This strategy for Eurasia was outlined by an American strategist, Zbig Brzezinski, in a 1997 article in foreign affairs magazine: By late 1990s the U.S. will take in central Europe, Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic. By the early two-thousands, we’ll take in the Baltic states. Now, that’s getting close to Russia. By 2005 to 2010, we’ll invite Ukraine to become part of NATO.
And so the U.S. conspired with the Ukrainian “right” to overthrow Yanukovych, and there was a violent overthrow in the third week of February of 2014. That’s when this war started. This war didn’t even start in 2022. It started in 2014.
Now the Russians are saying: “Are you kidding?” In 2007, President Putin gave a very clear speech at the Munich security conference, very powerful, very correct, very frustrated, where he said, gentlemen, you told us in 1990 NATO would never enlarge. That was the promise made to President Gorbachev, and it was the promise made to President Yeltsin. And you cheated, and you repeatedly cheated…
So, saying something’s “unprovoked” in 2022 is a little bizarre for anyone who actually reads a normal newspaper to begin with. But in any event, the war starts then (2014)