Judging Freedom - Ukraine War History - Why it was a Predictable Bloodbath w/Jeffrey Sachs

Episode Date: September 7, 2023

Ukraine War History - Why it was a Predictable Bloodbath w/Jeffrey SachsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, September 7th, 2023. We're very fortunate today to have as our guest Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University He is a world-renowned and much-honored scholar He is an expert in the field of the movement of geopolitical forces around the world And historically, he has written extensively on the conflict between Ukraine and Russia And he's kind enough to join us now I'm envious because when I was an undergraduate at Princeton University, we were not so fortunate as the students at Columbia

University are today to have someone like Professor Sachs on the faculty. Professor Sachs, thank you very much for joining us. It is so good to be with you. I'm absolutely delighted. Thank you. I'll let you lecture for a minute or two. Can you give us the basic background, starting in 1990, when Germany, the United States, and Russia agreed that NATO would not move one inch further east, take us to Minsk I and Minsk 2, and take us to the coup in 2014, largely engineered and orchestrated by the American State Department. Well, you've touched on all the main points that led to this war. I actually go back to the late 80s and early 90s because President Gorbachev asked me to help his economic team. President Yeltsin asked me to help his economic team.

President Kuchma, the first president of independent Ukraine, asked me to help his economic team. So I've watched this close up. Look, it was very straightforward. Gorbachev was a man of peace. He said that the Soviet Union will end the Warsaw Pact military alliance. And the US and Germany were very explicit. This is James Baker, Hans Dietrich Genscher, the foreign minister of Germany. We will not move NATO one inch eastward. Of course, it was a lie. It was a lie because as soon as the Soviet Union ended and Russia became the continuation

state or the successor state, as it's sometimes called, the United States immediately within, even Bush won, was calculating, okay, how do we expand NATO? We won, they lost, we expand, promises, commitments don't mean anything. And already our diplomats, the senior diplomats, Jack Matlock, U.S. ambassador to Russia, of course, George Kennan, perhaps the greatest historian scholar of our time and the original author of Containment in 1947, said this is a terrible idea. Don't break the peace with Russia right away. Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, no, I'm sorry, Bill Perry at the time, said, don't do this. And he thought about resigning. But you know, Clinton, he didn't

think very hard about it. The security state said, just move right on in. NATO expansion started. We know from Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1997 that the game plan was already clear, the timeline, to go all the way to Ukraine and further to Georgia. And if you look at a map, Georgia ain't a North Atlantic country by any means in the caucuses. Let me just stop you right here. You are not saying that Jim Baker and George H.W. Bush changed their minds. You are not saying that events caused them to rethink this. You are saying that they knowingly deceived Mikhail Gorbachev. No, I'm not sure about that. What was clear in the Bush administration was a division between

Baker, who was really a pretty pragmatic guy, I think a very effective guy in a lot of ways. And the hardliners, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, who would invent the neocon era, in fact. And so I'm not sure that they knowingly lied in 90. They were giddy, though. Giddy. My God, we are winning. We're going to take all the pieces. But it was really a 92. After the December end of the Soviet Union in 1991, I happened to be in the room when it happened, as they say. Actually, I was sitting in the room in the Kremlin when President Yeltsin walked across the room, sat down directly in front of me and said, gentlemen, to this assembly of economists, I can announce the end of the Soviet Union. It was a rather astounding moment. But then as soon as that happened, I think Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld went into overdrive. It was a very strange last year of the Bush one administration. Clinton, I don't think ever knew what he was doing in foreign policy, probably until today, in my own opinion.

But in any event, we how does how does how does Ukraine answer this assorted history? I think Ukraine enters from an old proposition going back to the Crimean War of the middle of the 19th century, which is if you can surround Russia in the Black Sea, you've really ended Russian power. And this was very clear to Zbigniew Brzezinski in his global chessboard of 1997. He said that Ukraine was the geographic pivot of Eurasia. And you look at a map. What was the idea? The idea was that U.S. military forces would be in Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia.

And you look at the map, Sevastopol, the Russian base in 1783, is right there. And then it's cornered. And the Russians knew this. And they were saying from the early 90s, don't do this. And then when it started to become apparent that doing this meant not only Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic, which they swallowed hard on, but those are Central European states after all, when they saw that this is NATO coming to their borders. And in 2007, that meant the three Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania,

and Estonia. It meant two Black Sea countries, Romania and Bulgaria, and it meant the Balkan states, Slovenia and also Slovakia, they said in 2007, my God, don't do anything more. And that's when President Putin at the Munich Security Conference really laid it out very clearly. He said, look, you guys promised in 1991, not one inch eastward, all you're doing is threatening a new conflict stop. Well, I think the defining feature of American foreign policy is arrogance, and they can't listen. They cannot hear red lines of any other country. They don't believe they exist. The only red lines are American red lines. Before we get to the impetus behind this arrogance in American foreign policy, and before you tell us about the harm caused by the neocons, bring us into 2004 and 2014 in Ukraine.

2004 was called the Orange Revolution. It was a contested election. The United States played a strong role in contesting the election, and American-funded Ukrainian so-called civil society institutions played a a role in the election, was overturned, and the pro-U.S. candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, won a rerun of the election. And he called for NATO enlargement. But he lasted one term, and in the rerun of the competition between Yushchenko and Yanukovych, excuse me, and President Yanukovych. Yanukovych won the next round very handily, by the way. And so Yanukovych came in in 2010, 2011, 2012, saying, look, the U.S. in 2008 at the Bucharest NATO summit said NATO will enlarge to Ukraine. And Yanukovych said, no, no, please, please. We are in between. We will be

neutral. Thank you. It was extremely prudent. This is the key to understand prudence. Careful. When you're on Russia's border, be careful. When you're in between the Western nuclear superpower, the Russian nuclear superpower, be careful. And Yanukovych tried to be careful. He really did try with skill to be careful. He knew the country was divided, divided ethnically, divided about its beliefs about the future, divided economically. And so he tried to do things to tamp down this U.S. neocon push for NATO enlargement. One of the key things he did was to say to the Russians, look, you can have a long-term lease on your Sevastopol naval base. Yes, it has been your naval base since 1783, and we're not going to tamper with it. Very smart. He said, we will be neutral. This was a big majority backing him at the time.

And what happens to him? What does the U.S. State Department do about this out of about 2014? Well, at the end of 2013, things got very complicated because the Europeans were pushing hard for a roadmap to Ukrainian membership in the EU, which unfortunately has become completely entwined with membership in NATO. And on the other hand, Ukraine was in financial crisis. The IMF was doing its usual twisting, twisting the knot as tight as possible. President Putin was saying, you can't make an agreement on free trade with Europe without including us. We are a free trade partner with you. We need to discuss this too. Yanukovych said, OK, we'll delay signing with the EU. Protests broke out and the U.S. saw its moment. We can stoke these protests. OK, John McCain will

go over there. Lindsey Graham will go over there. Victoria Nuland will nonstop shuttle to Kiev. We can even, you know, overthrow this government that is calling for neutrality. And it's pretty clear in early 2014 that regime change and a typical kind of U.S. covert regime change operation was underway. And I say typical because scholarly studies have shown that just during the Cold War period alone, there were 64 U.S. regime, covert regime change operations. This is, it's astounding. A serious scholarship has devoted its time to tracing all the times the U.S. overthrows or tries to overthrow other governments. The U.S. overthrows Yanukovych. He's replaced by somebody sympathetic to the West. Let me tell you, just to say, in this overthrow and Victoria Nuland, who was then the Assistant Secretary of State for Obama, now is our Deputy Secretary of State.

She was the point person in the U.S. engagement in the overthrow of Yanukovych. And in an incredible excerpted phone call, Russians probably were able to tap into the call between Nuland and the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Jeffrey Piat. She described forming the new government, and she also described something absolutely remarkable, which is, OK, we're going to get the veep, the big guy, Biden, to come in and do his attaboys and make everything work out well. And who was engaged with her on that? Jake Sullivan, who at the time was the vice president's national security advisor. So we've seen this, we've seen this team continuously operating since 2014. Biden's been absolutely part of this since then and before, because he always was pushing NATO enlargement. So what we had was a Russophobic government come in, a lot of right wing elements, extreme nationalist elements come in. Immediately, Putin said, you're not taking Crimea for a NATO naval base. a completely Russian ethnic part of the region in Crimea and said now Crimea is part of Russia. And we know that two breakaway regions in the Donbas in eastern Ukraine were basically military parts of the Ukrainian army that did not want to succumb to a Russophobic

regime now installed in Kiev. Are those the parts of Ukraine, Professor Sachs, that the current regime in Kiev has been shelling and shooting at its own people? Well, as soon as these breakaway republics broke away and taking some of the armaments with them to defend these new breakaway regions, which were demanding autonomy, by the way, that's what they were demanding. They were demanding the use of the Russian language, the Russian Orthodox Church, the relations with Russia, the family relations, the travel, the open borders, and so forth. The war began with essentially right-wing militaries like the Azov Battalion and so forth, the Bandaristas, pretty fascistic ideologies in some cases, attacking in the East. And a lot of people died. Thousands and thousands of people were being killed. Civilians, ethnic Russian

civilians in the Donbas. What era is this? This is before February of 2022. Oh, this already goes back to 2014. Well, you never saw this on the front page of The New York Times or The Washington Post. Incidentally, in 2017, 2018, you saw a lot of stories that Ukraine has a Nazi problem, a lot of Nazi symbols, a lot of fascism. Those stories completely disappeared. But those stories are actually even searchable online, what they were saying back then. But the key point is the following. Russia said, stop killing ethnic Russian civilians. We need peace.

And two agreements were negotiated. And the most important was the Minsk II agreement. And what the Minsk II agreement called for was autonomy for Donetsk and Lugansk, for these two breakaway regions, not to become part of Russia, not to become an independent state. Who agreed? Who agreed? What parties, what countries agreed to the Minsk II agreement, Professor Sachs? The government of Ukraine, these two breakaway parts of Ukraine, which signed, and then guarantors of this agreement. And this is fascinating, because in Europe, the two guarantors were Germany, under then-Chancellor Angela Merkel, and France,

under President Hollande originally. And the whole agreement remarkably went to the UN Security Council, where it was also backed 15 to nothing in the UN Security Council. This was a serious agreement. It was never enforced by the Ukrainians. And I can tell you my own experience, knowing many senior Ukrainian officials, I said, look, you've got to honor the Minsk agreement. They said, no, we're never going to do that. That was done at gunpoint. I said, come on, you've signed the agreement. The UN Security Council has endorsed the agreement. This is diplomacy. It's to keep the peace. We're never going to do it. And now we know that no Ukrainian leader had any intention of doing it. And then Angela Merkel, just a few months ago, gave a remarkable, very,

very disappointing interview where she said, yes, we knew it wasn't really going to be agreed or followed, but it gave some time for the Ukrainians to build up their strength. We also can surmise, and again, since our government operates in as much secrecy as they can possibly get away with without whistleblowers and leaks, they absolutely told the Ukrainians, don't worry about a thing. We've got your back. You're going to join NATO. And then to bring it up to the present, when Biden came in, of course, no one knew exactly what this meant, but we could have known because Biden's been part of this story since the overthrow of Yanukovych, and he's been part of the NATO enlargement story for even

longer than that, so we should have known. But some of us had some hope that there would be some rationality in this process. And Biden instead absolutely doubled down. Ukraine will be part of NATO. We will increase the armaments. The 2021 NATO summit enforced this again. The United States in the first year of the Biden administration signed two high level agreements with the Ukrainian government, underscoring Ukraine's membership in NATO, one with the State Department, one with the Defense Department. Now, at the end of 2021, on December 17th, President Putin put forward a draft security agreement between Russia and the United States. I read it. I thought, you know what? Absolutely negotiable. Not everything is going to be accepted, but the

core of this is NATO should stop the enlargement so we don't have a war. And I called the White House at the end of 2021 when somebody was still talking to me and I had a long talk and I said, avoid this war. This war is avoid it's not going to happen. No, no, we have an open door policy. I said, that's no policy. That's a path to war. And you know it. You've got to negotiate. Click. So that phone call, as so many in my career, didn't do anything except to tell me, my God, these people do not understand anything about diplomacy, anything about reality. Their own diplomats have been telling them for 30 years, this is a path to war. Our current CIA director, William Burns, very bright chap, sent a famous message to Condoleezza Rice in 2008. Of course, we know about it only because of WikiLeaks. Everything is secret in our society. Everything is lies, by the way, in our society, except when things are leaked.

But the memo was famously entitled, Niet means Niet. Don't do this NATO thing with Ukraine of all the neuralgic points you could possibly do in your diplomacy. Well, the Biden people couldn't listen because Newland and Blinken and Sullivan and Biden have been in it up to their necks since 2014, completely irresponsibly in my view. And on February 21st, 2022, there's an extraordinary Russian Security Council meeting. It's extraordinary because we can read online the minutes of the meeting. And President Putin calls on the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov. Minister Lavrov, please report on your negotiations over our proposed security arrangements. And Lavrov says, Mr. President, we have failed entirely because

the United States has declared unequivocally that NATO enlargement is not our business and that there is nothing to discuss about it. And of course, Putin gave his address to the nation and explained that Russian national security was at deep risk and the special military operation started February 24. Now, what's absolutely interesting in all of this is that within a few days, within a few days, Zelensky starts saying publicly, you know, we could be neutral. You know, we don't really have to be part of NATO. This starts within a few days. This was the essence of what Russia was trying to do, not to conquer Kiev. It was trying to push a settlement of this security issue. Was there a reduced to writing but never ratified settlement in March of 2022?

There indeed was. And I have had the chance to speak with several very, very senior people that were involved in this. And one thing that's extremely interesting, when Zelensky made his statements, President Putin said to his top aides, well, OK, see what this is about. And Ukraine actually put something on paper as a first draft. And the Russian leadership looked at it, sent it on to Putin. And President Putin said, okay, draft an agreement, draft a draft agreement. They were actually negotiating, and they were negotiating in Ankara under a very skilled diplomatic corps of Turkey. Is this the negotiation with the then Prime Minister of Israel as well as diplomats from Turkey. Yes. Let me guess,

who disrupted this agreement? The U.S. State Department. Naftali Bennett is hilarious, by the way, because you don't see prime ministers talking this way. He gave a five-hour interview where he explained his life. He told us lots of fascinating things. And one of the things he explained to us was how interesting it was. He suddenly found himself as intermediary of Putin and Zelensky and Biden and Schultz. And yeah, it was very exciting. And they were working on the seventh draft and they were making progress. They were coming close to signing. And then and then Natali Bennett explains in this wonderful interview, quite remarkable.

He says that they stopped it. They stopped it. And so does the American stopped it. And he actually explains, by the way, they stopped it because they wanted to look tough to China. They were worried that this could look weak to China. So it's not even a proxy war with Russia. It's all about China in this crazy, crazy, topsy-turvy, weird failure of diplomacy. And then, of course, after Bennett says this and everyone's shocked, he walks it back.

No, no, no, I didn't say that. I didn't mean it. Because that's the other way that our world works is when a little bit of truth leaks out, you deny it, even though it's in front of your eyes, even though you could play the tapes again and again. So the United States stopped the diplomacy and Ukraine has been the victim. And I would say, of course, its leadership doesn't represent the interests of the Ukrainian people, in my view, at all, because this has been a bloodbath since then, a tragic, predictable bloodbath. And all of the shows you've had, Judge, with Scott Ritter and

with Douglas McGregor have explained all along why this is going to be a bloodbath. I know the economic side, that the sanctions weren't going to work. I understood the diplomatic side. I didn't know the military side. But this has been a predictable bloodbath, and the Americans have known it. And even this vaunted counteroffensive of the last three months, they knew this wasn't going to work. But, you know, Biden, oh, he's running for reelection. Zelensky, he's dug into this. So we have this terrible, terrible phenomenon of the interests of the world being staked on the interests of a few politicians. This is completely upside down. Wow. What an extraordinary, remarkable, gifted, no notes in your hands, lecture on all of this. Where do you see this going?

I mean, Victoria Nuland and the neocons who have brought us to this precipice are not going to back down. In my view, they want to use Ukraine as a battering ram for their fanciful view that it can drive President Putin from office. MR. Everything can still happen, except that, I'm pretty sure, in terms of what will happen on the battlefield. It could be that after the exhaustion of this Ukrainian counteroffensive, which is exhausted and which has claimed tens of thousands of deaths and so many wounded and massive destruction of the military equipment, the miracle weapon shipped over, could be that Russia launches a major offensive and changes completely the situation. This is one possibility. Another possibility is that this grinding, continuing, bloody, horrible war continues because a few politicians don't want to admit how wrongheaded, predictably wrongheaded this whole thing is. There's always the chance also that these completely intemperate and irresponsible people in our government aim to escalate because maybe the situation turns down and they say,

oh, this is bad for Biden's reelection, as if we should care. Our politicians work for us. We don't work for them. I never care about a politician's reelection. I care about what they are doing. But if they decide to escalate, we're talking about the world's two largest nuclear superpowers. And never we should put that out of our minds. We shouldn't. We're told, oh, don't worry about it, don't worry about it. But, you know, I've been studying this

issue also for decades. We should always worry about what intemperate, dangerous, intemperate people in dangerous circumstances can do, how accidents can happen, how we can lose control of events. It's all terribly dangerous. We need a completely new approach to all of this, predictably so, because you could have known back in 1990 or in 1997 or in 2007 or in 2008 and 2014 or in 2021 or in 2022. This was a huge, huge blunder of Biden. We need a new approach. Frankly, he needs a new foreign policy team. This foreign policy team is so dug in. Of course, he's dug into it too, but he's the president. So he needs to hire a new team that knows how to get out of this absolutely catastrophic mess. Professor Sachs, I'm in awe of your knowledge of this. I usually speak a lot more during the show,

but far be it from me to interrupt you. We'll call it quits now, but I hope you can come back because I'd like to ask you some more questions. This has been a brilliant, gifted analysis, consistent with what this program has stood for, consistent with the military side of this from Colonel McGregor and Scott Ritter, consistent with the intelligence side of this from Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern. Judge, you have been saying it straight from the very beginning, and you're the only one in our countries that got it from the start so, so clearly on all of these dimensions. And I just really praise you, and I'm honored to be on your program. We'll do it again soon, Professor Sachs. Thank

you very much. Have a great weekend. Thank you. You too. Bye-bye. Well, if you like what you saw, and I suspect you did, help us spread this message. Tell a friend, tell a co-worker, tell a family member, like and subscribe, because what do we do here on Judging Freedom? We are looking out for your liberty. Thank you.