This Is The Best Explanation Summarising Why It Was NATO And Not Russia That Caused The War In Ukraine.

It's A Transcript Of What Jeffrey Sachs (American Economist And Professor At Columbia University) Had To Say About It.

It just so happens that I am in the middle of a back-and-forth on this subject matter with a) a person who believes whatever the MSM says, or b) a troll. Then I stumbled upon a 4:46 minute long video in the form of a note here on substack, and on that note (pun intended) I would like to add that my experience with notes here is that they are memory-holed if you navigate away from them. Posts are easy to go back to, but notes “disappear”. That’s why I filmed the clip with my phone when I decided transcribe it. Here it is.

This was not a Russian attack on Ukraine in the way we are told every day. This started in 1990. February 9th, 1990 Jamess Baker III, our Secretary of State said to Michail Gorbachov “NATO will not move one inch eastward if you agree to German unification.”, basically ending WWII.

Gorbachov said “That’s very important, yes. NATO doesn’t move, and we agree to German unification.” The US then cheated on this already starting in 1994 when Clinton signed off on a…, basically a plan to expand NATO all the way to Ukraine. This is when the so called Neocons (1) took power and Clinton was the first agent of this, and the expansion of NATO started in 1999 with Poland, Hungary and the Check Republic.

At that point Russia didn’t much care. There was no border other than with the Königsberg. Other than that there was no direct threat. Then the US led the bombing of Serbia in 1999. That was bad, by the way, because that was a use of NATO to bomb a European capitol, Belgrade, 78 straight days to break the country apart. The Russians didn’t like that very much, but Putin became President. They swallowed it. They complained, but even Putin started out pro European, pro American actually. Asked «Maybe we should join NATO?» when there was still the idea of some kind of mutual and respectful relationship.

Then 9/11 came. Then came Afghanistan, and the Russians said, «We’ll support you. We understand you want to root out terror.  ….., but then came two other decisive actions. In 2002 the US unilaterally walked out of the Anti Balistic Missile Treaty. This was probably the most decisive event never discussed in this context, but what it did was the US putting in missile systems in Eastern Europe that Russia view as a dire direct threat.

In 2004 -05 we engaged in a soft regime change operation in Ukraine, but in 2009 Yanukovic won the election, and he became the President in 2010 on the basis of neutrality for Ukraine.

That calmed things down because the US was pushing NATO, but the people of Ukraine on the opinion polls didn’t even want to be in NATO. They knew that the country is divided between ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians. “What do we want with this? We want to stay away from your problems.”

So, on February 22nd, 2014 the United States participated actively in the overthrow of Yanucovych. A typical US regime change operation. Have no doubt about it. And the Russians did us a favor. They intercepted a really ugly call (2) between Victoria Nuland, my colleague at Columbia University now. Between her and the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffery Pyatt who is a senior State Department official till today. …, and they talked about regime change. They said, “Who’s going to be the next government?” All of this is to say the US then said, “OK, now NATO is really going to enlarge”, and Putin kept saying “Stop! You promised no NATO enlargement.” It’s been, by the way, I forgot to mention in 2004, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia. Seven more countries, and in the not-one-inch-eastward. …, and then, ok, it’s a long story, but the US kept rejecting the basic idea “Don’t expand NATO to Russia’s border.”, in a context where we’re putting in Goddamned missile systems after breaking a treaty. In 2019 we walked out of the Intermediate Nuclear Force Treaty.

On December 15th, 2021 Putin put on the table a draft Russia-US security agreement. You can find it online. The basis of it is no NATO enlargement. I called the White House the week after that begging them. “Take the negotiations. Putin is offering something. Avoid this war”. “Oh, Jeff, there’s not going to be a war, and announced that NATO is not going to enlarge. “Oh, don’t worry.” …, and I said, “Oh, you’re going to have a war over something that’s not going to happen? Why don’t you announce it?”, and they said, “No, no, our policy is an open door policy.” Open door for NATO enlargement. That goes under the category of bullshit, by the way. You don’t have the right to put your military bases anywhere you want and expect peace in this world.

They turned down the negotiations. (3) Then the special military operation started, and five days later Zelensky said, “Ok, ok! Neutrality.”, and then the United States and Britain said, “No way! You guys fight on. We’ve got your back. We don’t have your front. You’re all gonna die, but we got your back.”, and we kept pushing them into the front line.

That’s 600.000 deaths now, of Ukrainians, since Boris Johnson flew into Kiev to tell them to be brave.

1.      Richard Milhouse Nixon called the Neocons “The crazies in the basement”.

2.      In which Pyat said “…, but the EU wants…” and Nuland interupted him and said “Fuck the EU! We want Yatsieniuk!”

3.      I have put the following in several comments before, but here it is once more. On 12 January, 2022 I came home after having been at work for four weeks. Five days later, on Monday, 17 January at 10AM I heard loud airplane noise, so I went to find out what it was. I saw two C-130 transport planes flying in the general direction of Poland. I said to my wife, “Now the shit is hitting the fan. It’s either Belarus or Ukraine.”

The two planes returned ten hours later. The planes went back and forth for five days, so I watched the evening news that whole week waiting for an explanation. On Friday I got it. The news anchor spent seven minutes talking about the brutal dictator in Belaruse, and another seven minutes talking about the psychopath in the Kremlin. I’m not kidding.

Then came the most important sentence a Norwegian news anchor has said in at least a decade: “The movement of large quantities of military equipment is NOT a part of a military drill”, before swiftly moving on to a fluff piece about Norway’s Oscar nomination for best foreign movie. This was a full month before Russia’s Special Military Operation.