Year nine in the Ukraine war
We are not at the one-year anniversary of the war, as Western governments and media claim. This is the nine-year anniversary of the war. And 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. During his presidency (2010-2014), Yanukovych 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 had pushed for from 2008 onward.
We must keep this relentless drive towards NATO expansion in context. The US and Germany explicitly and repeatedly promised Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not enlarge “one inch eastward” after Gorbachev disbanded the Soviet military alliance known as the Warsaw Pact. The entire premise of NATO enlargement was a violation of agreements reached with 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,” for which he was executive producer and in which he features, directed by Igor Lopatonok. Professor Ivan Katchanovski of the University of Ottawa has written powerful academic studies, reviewing the evidence of the Maidan Uprising and finding that most of the violence and killing originated not from Yanukovych’s security detail, but from coup leaders themselves, who fired into the crowds, killing both policemen and demonstrators.
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 Kiev. After the coup, Russia quickly retook Crimea following a quick referendum, and war broke out in the Donbas as Russians in the Ukraine Army switched sides to oppose the post-coup government in Kiev.
The entire premise of NATO enlargement was a violation of agreements reached with Soviet Union, and therefore with the continuation state of Russia
NATO almost immediately began to pour in billions of dollars of weaponry to Ukraine, and the war escalated. The Minsk I and Minsk II peace agreements, in which France and Germany were to be co-guarantors, did not function, first, because the nationalist Ukrainian government in Kiev refused to implement them, and second, because Germany and France did not press for their implementation, as recently admitted by former chancellor Angela Merkel.
At the end of 2021, President Putin made very clear that the three red lines for Russia were: (1) NATO enlargement to Ukraine as unacceptable; (2) Russia would maintain control of Crimea; and (3) the war in the Donbas needed to be settled by implementation of Minsk II. The Biden White House refused to negotiate on the issue of NATO enlargement.
The Russian invasion tragically and wrongly took place in February 2022, eight years after the Yanukovych coup. The United States 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. The US has blocked attempts at negotiation (especially March 2022) and reportedly destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline in September 2022.
We are on a path of dire escalation and the narrative that this is the first anniversary of war is a falsehood that hides the reasons of this war and the way to end it. This is a war that needs to stop before it engulfs all of us in nuclear Armageddon. I praise the peace movement for its valiant efforts, especially in the face of brazen lies and propaganda by the US government and craven silence by the European governments, which act as wholly subservient to the US neoconservatives.
We must speak truth. Both sides need to back off. NATO must stop the attempt to enlarge to Ukraine and to Georgia. Russia must withdraw from Ukraine. We must listen to the red lines of both sides so that the world will survive.
Jeffrey D. Sachs is professor at Columbia University, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia and president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has served as adviser to three UN secretaries-general, and currently serves as an SDG advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
