A 10 minutes history lesson that frames how we got to this point.
Worth your time.
Thank you for posting.
Sachs is an economist, scholar, advisor with decades of first-hand experience in dealing with these matters and negotiations between the West and Russia, who is now cancelled from all Western mainstream media. I'd like to fill in a couple of details that he neglected to mention.
People in the West getting their information from Western media will be lead to believe that history began in the year 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. They will be left utterly ignorant of the significant events and developments in the 8 years prior leading up to the war, and likewise going further to early 90s from when Sachs started his talk in the link. Western media tells us that 2022 was the start of Putin's megalomaniac rampage to take over Europe and restore a Russian empire. This cartoonish supervillain narrative is on par with US taking out Saddam and bombing Iraq to hell because of WMD, terrorism and how much they "hate our freedoms and democracy".
Since 2014 there has been armed conflict tantamount to a civil war, with 14000 people killed. Ethnic Russian people, who were one fifth of the total population in Ukraine, started to being violently repressed and persecuted, and Russian gas pipelines to Europe and access to the Black Sea and Mediterranean for trade came under threat. There were one MILLION refugees fleeing east into Russia from the Donbass region. Russia and Putin have BEEN trying diplomacy and negotiations through all this time until 2022, to no avail. The West signed the Minsk peace agreements in bad faith simply to buy time and build up Ukrainian forces, Merkel and Sarkozy have admitted this publicly, to continue the push for conflict and ultimately war. Those pipelines are now destroyed, along with Nord Stream which clearly was taken out by the US.
Finally, Russia had enough and started the special military operation. Since then, they've secured their interests and are now trying to wait out the West, with no interest to take over any more territory in Ukraine or elsewhere.
Please observe the situation objectively: Russia has vital economic and security concerns, and a large ethnic Russian population in Ukraine that was being killed and displaced. There were NO hostilities before the US started meddling in Ukraine on the other side of the globe where they have NO legitimate reason to be at all. Government was overthrown and West began arming and training forces that contain crazy units of self-proclaimed Neo Nazis who put the swastika on their uniforms. This was merely an opportunity to begin yet another armed conflict, to play and sacrifice Ukraine as a pawn against Russia to inflict damage and create war profits. So when you say Russia started the war and invaded a sovereign country, that makes absolutely ZERO sense, and you're either severely ignorant of the history or disingenuous.
This is what the West do. Our economies are based on exploitation and war. Anyone who bucked against the dollar-based American global hegemony got taken out, and any chance they get, the military industrial complex will foment war and conflict because that is how careers and fortunes are made. Every NATO expansion is a win for the MIC, because members are obligated to spend a percentage of their budgets on defense, which means buying arms and equipment from US defense companies.
Meanwhile, domestically people are being exploited to work in a fake deindustrialized economy that purposefully concentrates wealth to rich elites and their private fortunes. About 1 in 3 Americans between 18 and 34 years old live with their parents. People are being price gouged to death for the basic necessities of life: housing, utilities, healthcare and prescription drugs. This is done by means of inflated debts and costs and by pumping up real estate and financial markets (instead investing in industry and jobs), all that enriches the elites.
That is how the US treats its OWN population, so do you think they have any qualms about sacrificing foreigners in wars just for a profit? Things haven't really changed much since colonial and slavery times. Ask China about their lost century, caused by the Opium Wars. Look into the Crimean War of the 1800s, which exactly like the current war was the West striking Russia where it hurts, in the very same region.
you talk as if they're fighting without restraint. russia using iraian and chinese drones, north korean artillery. they won't even be able to afford to develop their "captured" towns since russia is still underdeveloped in many places and it's bad look politically. russia is in a lose lose situation. china and india will dog walk them cause they need them to buy their oil. the longer this goes war goes on for, the less europe will depend on russian oil going through india and develop other alternative energy supply/sources.
Please understand that if you talk like this poster to anyone outside of North America and Europe, you will sound like a complete idiot. Americans have no fukking idea what is going on in the world, and how fast the global south led by BRICS is trying to get away from all Western based systems for trade, banking/finance and security. Western people in general are the most propagandized people of all time. The Ukraine and Gaza wars have been the ultimate exposal of how crazy and evil Western governments are, which along with the failing trade wars will accelerate these global developments.
Economists project that global consumer class will grow by 2 billion people by 2030. That is almost all in the global south. THIS is where the money is, and the West has NOTHING to offer for them to buy, except maybe Coca Cola, some fast food brands and Hollywood movies, because it's all overpriced uncompetitive industries here. Their development will be served entirely by Chinese and BRICS exports. European and American economies are COOKED.
Jeffrey Sachs feels guilty about everything's that's happened.
He and other folks led the post-Soviet economic "shock therapy" which left millions of Russians destitute and crushed socialist institutions like universal healthcare in Russia. Such policies allowed oligarchs to enrich themselves on the carcass of the Soviet Union. It also propelled Boris Yeltsin's drunk ass to power. I wonder if Sachs was involved when the United States intervened in Russia's 1996 elections to stop the Communists from winning electoral victory?
Anyway, Russia's impoverishment allowed Russia's KGB securocrats (i.e. Putin) to win the support of the Russian people who were tired of being sucked dry by the West and their lackeys.
Thanks for bringing this up.
When people mention Russian oligarchs, they are mostly ignorant that they came onto the scene because of the West. That is who the West wanted to work with after the Soviet Union fell, to get cheap Russian energy, to open their markets to Western corporations and to stop all domestic social and economic development - the basic modus operandi of IMF/World Bank policies, which are an extension of American policies of exploitation, and the reason why Africa largely has remained undeveloped till this day. Things are finally beginning to change now they've found new partners in... guess where, certainly not in the West. Anyway, Russia was a corrupt, failed state until Putin came into power and began to reign in all of that nonsense. Matt Taibbi has told all about this. He was working in Russia at the time so he knows from first-hand.