Unite to end nine-year Ukraine War

We are not at the first anniversary of the war in Ukraine, as Western governments and the media claim, but the ninth. That makes a big difference. 

The war began with the violent overthrow of Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, a coup that was overtly and covertly backed by the United States government in the service of Nato expansion.

The Yanukovych presidency (2010-2014) sought military neutrality, precisely to avoid a civil or proxy war in Ukraine. But this stood in the way of Nato enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia that the US pushed for from 2008.

We must keep this relentless drive towards Nato expansion in context. The US and Germany explicitly and repeatedly promised USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev that Nato would not enlarge “one inch eastward” after he disbanded the Soviet military alliance, the Warsaw Pact.

The entire premise of Nato enlargement was a violation of agreements reached with the Soviet Union, and therefore with the continuation state of Russia. 

The neocons have pushed Nato enlargement because they seek to surround Russia in the Black Sea region, akin to the aims of Britain and France in the Crimean War (1853-56). US strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski described Ukraine as the “geographical pivot” of Eurasia.

If the US could surround Russia in the Black Sea region, and incorporate Ukraine into the US military alliance, Russia’s ability to project power in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, and globally would disappear, or so goes the theory. 

US Film director Oliver Stone helps us to understand the US involvement in the coup and what a US regime-change operation looks like in his 2016 documentary, Ukraine on Fire. Prof Ivan Katchanovski, of the University of Ottawa, has written powerful academic studies, reviewing the evidence of the Maidan and finding that most of the violence and killing originated not from Yanukovych’s security detail but the coup leaders, who fired into the crowds, killing both policemen and demonstrators. 

Genesis

The coup was the start of the war nine years ago. An extra-constitutional, right-wing, anti-Russian and ultra-nationalist government came to power in Kyiv. After the coup, Russia quickly retook Crimea following a quick referendum, and war broke out in the Donbass as Russians in the Ukraine army switched sides to oppose the post-coup government in Kyiv. 

Nato almost immediately began to pour billions of dollars of weaponry into Ukraine, and the war escalated. The Minsk-1 and Minsk-2 peace agreements, in which France and Germany were to be co-guarantors, did not function, first, because the nationalist Ukrainian government in Kyiv refused to implement them, and second, because Germany and France did not press for their implementation, as recently admitted by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel. 

At the end of 2021, President Putin made very clear that the three red lines for Russia were: Nato enlargement to Ukraine as unacceptable; Russia would maintain control of Crimea; and the war in the Donbass needed to be settled by the implementation of Minsk-2. 

The Biden White House refused to negotiate on the issue of Nato enlargement. 

The Russian invasion tragically and wrongly took place in February last year, eight years after the Yanukovych coup. The US has poured in tens of billions of dollars of armaments and budget support since 2014, doubling down on the US attempt to expand its military alliance into Ukraine and Georgia. 

The deaths and destruction in this escalating battlefield are horrific. 

We are on a path of dire escalation and the narrative that this is the first anniversary of the war is a falsehood that hides the reasons for this war and the way to end it. I praise the peace movement for its valiant efforts. We must speak the truth. Both sides need to back off. Nato must stop the attempt to enlarge Ukraine and to Georgia. Russia must withdraw from Ukraine. 

We must listen to the red lines of both sides to stop the war before it engulfs us all in nuclear Armageddon. 

Prof Sachs is a professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. www.jeffsachs.org.