Me: “In 2014 we executed a color revolution that eventually led to a coup d’état of the duly elected Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych. “
The truth is what we saw. We saw a color revolution started to rile up hatred amongst the citizenry.
Viktoria Nuland was present handing out either cookies as some claim or sandwiches which she herself claims along with drinks.
Victoria Nuland never shook the mantle of ideological meddler
We saw deadly violence escalate and blamed on Viktor Yanukovych. We saw Viktor Yanukovych run out of office and flee for his life. That is Prima facie evidence that he was ejected via a coup d'état. Which many of you Ukraine supporters claim is not true.
No, that is claims made by U.S. military analysts
Yes Putin did via subversion by Russian intelligence operatives created the “separatist” movement in eastern Ukraine. That was not “aid” he was giving, it was his proxy war against Ukraine.
That is propaganda. No evidence has been presented that confirms that Russian troops were involved. The fighting in eastern Ukraine began almost immediately after Russia retook the Crimea. Crimea was not captured from Ukraine by Catherine the Great, it was captured from the Ottoman Empire which had control of it for centuries. Another fact that those supporting Ukraine deny and say that it is irrelevant even if true, because Nikita Khrushchev, who never married his long time partner who bore is children was form Ukraine.
Why Did Russia Give Away Crimea Sixty Years Ago?
The following is the introduction by the author Mark Kramer
Crimea was part of Russia from 1783, when the Tsarist Empire annexed it a decade after defeating Ottoman forces in the Battle of Kozludzha, until 1954, when the Soviet government transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federation of Socialist Republics (RSFSR) to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkrSSR). The transfer was announced in the Soviet press in late February 1954, eight days after the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet adopted a resolution authorizing the move on 19 February. The text of the resolution and some anodyne excerpts from the proceedings of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet meeting on 19 February were published along with the very brief announcement.[1] Nothing else about the transfer was disclosed at the time, and no further information was made available during the remainder of the Soviet era.
Not until 1992, just after the Soviet Union was dissolved, did additional material about this episode emerge. A historical-archival journal, Istoricheskii arkhiv (Historical Archive), which had been published in the USSR from 1955 until 1962, began appearing again in 1992 with transcriptions of declassified documents from the former Soviet archives. The first issue of the revived Istoricheskii arkhiv in 1992 contained a section about the transfer of Crimea that featured documents from the Russian Presidential Archive and from a few other archives whose collections are now housed at the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). Unfortunately, these documents do not add anything of substance to what was published in the Soviet press 38 years earlier; indeed, they are mostly identical to what was published in 1954. (Apparently, the editors of Istoricheskii arkhiv were unaware that the scripted proceedings of the USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium meeting had already been published in 1954.) The documents do confirm that the move was originally approved by the Presidium of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) on 25 January 1954, paving the way for the authorizing resolution of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet three weeks later. But the declassified files reveal nothing more about the motives for the transfer, leaving us with just the two official rationales that were published in 1954:
(1) the cession of Crimea was a “noble act on the part of the Russian people” to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the “reunification of Ukraine with Russia” (a reference to the Treaty of Pereyaslav signed in 1654 by representatives of the Ukrainian Cossack Hetmanate and Tsar Aleksei I of Muscovy) and to “evince the boundless trust and love the Russian people feel toward the Ukrainian people”; and
(2) the transfer was a natural outgrowth of the “territorial proximity of Crimea to Ukraine, the commonalities of their economies, and the close agricultural and cultural ties between the Crimean oblast and the UkrSSS.”
Neither of these ostensible justifications holds up to scrutiny. Even though 1954 was the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Pereyaslav, there is no connection between that treaty and the Crimean peninsula. Pereyaslav, in central Ukraine not far from Kyiv, is nowhere near Crimea, and the treaty had nothing to do with the peninsula, which did not come under Russian control until 130 years later. Moreover, the description of the treaty as having produced the “unification of Russia and Ukraine” is hyperbolic. The treaty did provide an important step in that direction, but years of further struggling and warfare had to take place before full unification occurred. In retrospect the Treaty of Pereyaslav is often associated (inaccurately) with Russian-Ukrainian unity, but it is hard to see why anyone in the USSR would have proposed celebrating the 300th anniversary of the document by transferring Crimea from the RSFSR to the UkrSSR.
The notion that the transfer was justified solely by Crimea’s cultural and economic affinities with Ukraine is also far-fetched. In the 1950s, the population of Crimea — approximately 1.1 million — was roughly 75 percent ethnic Russian and 25 percent Ukrainian. A sizable population of Tatars had lived in Crimea for centuries until May 1944, when they were deported en masse by the Stalinist regime to barren sites in Central Asia, where they were compelled to live for more than four decades and were prohibited from returning to their homeland. Stalin also forcibly deported smaller populations of Armenians, Bulgarians, and Greeks from Crimea, completing the ethnic cleansing of the peninsula. Hence, in 1954, Crimea was more “Russian” than it had been for centuries. Although Crimea is briefly contiguous with southern Ukraine via the Isthmus of Perekop, the large eastern Kerch region of Crimea is very close to Russia. The peninsula did have important economic and infrastructural ties with Ukraine, but cultural ties were much stronger overall with Russia than with Ukraine, and Crimea was the site of major military bases from Tsarist times on, having become a symbol of Imperial Russian military power against the Ottoman Turks.
Even though the publicly enunciated rationales for the transfer of Crimea to the UkrSSR were of little credibility, some of the comments published in 1954 and other information that has come to light since then do allow us to gauge why the Soviet authorities decided on this action. Of particular importance were the role of Nikita Khrushchev, the recent traumas inflicted on Ukraine, and the ongoing power struggle in the USSR.
Khrushchev had been elevated to the post of CPSU First Secretary in September 1953 but was still consolidating his leading position in early 1954. He had earlier served as the head of the Communist Party of Ukraine from the late 1930s through the end of 1949 (apart from a year-and-a-half during World War II when he was assigned as a political commissar to the front). During the last several years of Khrushchev’s tenure in the UkrSSR, he had overseen the Soviet government’s side of a fierce civil war in the newly annexed western regions of Ukraine, especially Volynia and Galicia. The civil war was marked by high levels of casualties and gruesome atrocities on both sides. Despite Khrushchev’s later role in denouncing Stalinism and implementing reforms in the USSR, he had relied on ruthless, unstinting violence to establish and enforce Soviet control over western Ukraine. Occasional armed clashes were still occurring in the mid-1950s, but the war was over by the time Crimea was transferred in February 1954. The repeated references at the meeting of the USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium on 19 February to the “unity of Russians and Ukrainians” and to the “great and indissoluble friendship” between the two peoples, and the affirmation that the transfer would demonstrate how wise it was to have Ukraine “under the leadership of the Communist Party and the Soviet government,” indicate that Khrushchev saw the transfer as a way of fortifying and perpetuating Soviet control over Ukraine now that the civil war had finally been won. Some 860,000 ethnic Russians would be joining the already large Russian minority in Ukraine.
A somewhat similar approach was used in the three newly annexed Baltic republics, especially Latvia and Estonia, both of which had had very few Russian inhabitants prior to the 1940s. The Stalinist regime encouraged ethnic Russians to settle in those republics from the late 1940s on, and this policy continued under Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. Proportionally, the transfer of Russians to the Baltic republics was greater than in Ukraine, but in absolute numbers the transfer of Crimea brought into Ukraine much larger numbers of Russians and a region closely identified with Russia, bolstering Soviet control.
The transfer of Crimea to the UkrSSR also was politically useful for Khrushchev as he sought to firm up the support he needed in his ongoing power struggle with Soviet Prime Minister Georgii Malenkov, who had initially emerged as the preeminent leader in the USSR in 1953 after Joseph Stalin’s death. Having been at a disadvantage right after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev had steadily whittled away at Malenkov’s position and had gained a major edge with his elevation to the post of CPSU First Secretary in September 1953. Nevertheless, the post-Stalin power struggle was by no means over in early 1954, and Khrushchev was trying to line up as much support as he could on the CPSU Presidium for a bid to remove Malenkov from the prime minister’s spot (a feat he accomplished in January 1955). Among those whose support Khrushchev was hoping to enlist was Oleksiy Kyrychenko, who had become first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine in early June 1953 (displacing Leonid Mel’nykov, who had succeeded Khrushchev in that post in December 1949) and soon thereafter had been appointed a full member of the CPSU Presidium. In 1944, when Khrushchev himself was still the Communist Party leader in Ukraine, he reportedly had suggested to Stalin that transferring Crimea to the UkrSSR would be a useful way of winning support from local Ukrainian elites.[2] Regardless of whether Khrushchev actually did bring up this matter with Stalin (the veracity of the secondhand retrospective account is uncertain), it most likely reflects Khrushchev’s own sense as early as 1944 that expanding Ukraine’s territory was a way of gaining elite support in the republic. In particular, Khrushchev almost certainly regarded the transfer of Crimea as a means of securing Kyrychenko’s backing. Khrushchev knew that he could not automatically count on Kyrychenko’s support because the two of them had been sharply at odds as recently as June 1953, when Kyrychenko endorsed Lavrentii Beria’s strong criticism of the situation in western Ukraine — criticism that implicitly attacked a good deal of what Khrushchev had done when he was the leader of the republic in the 1940s. Khrushchev hoped that the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine would dispel the lingering tensions from this episode and thereby help to solidify Kyrychenko’s support in the forthcoming showdown with Malenkov.
The earlier published documents, and materials that have emerged more recently, make clear that the transfer of Crimea from the RSFSR to the UkrSSR was carried out in accordance with the 1936 Soviet constitution, which in Article 18 stipulated that “the territory of a Union Republic may not be altered without its consent.” The proceedings of the USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium meeting indicate that both the RSFSR and the UkrSSR had given their consent via their republic parliaments. One of the officials present at the 19 February session, Otto Kuusinen, even boasted that “only in our country [the USSR] is it possible that issues of the utmost importance such as the territorial transfer of individual oblasts to a particular republic can be decided without any difficulties.” One might argue that the process in 1954 would have been a lot better if it had been complicated and difficult, but no matter how one judges the expeditiousness of the territorial reconfiguration, the main point to stress here is that it is incorrect to say (as some Russian commentators and government officials recently have) that Crimea was transferred unconstitutionally or illegally. The legal system in the Soviet Union was mostly a fiction, but the transfer did occur in accordance with the rules in effect at the time. Moreover, regardless of how the transfer was carried out, the Russian Federation expressly accepted Ukraine’s 1991 borders both in the December 1991 Belovezhskaya Pushcha accords (the agreements that precipitated and codified the dissolution of the Soviet Union) and in the December 1994 Budapest Memorandum that finalized Ukraine’s status as a non-nuclear weapons state.
Crimea had originally been an “autonomous republic” (avtonomnaya respublika) in the RSFSR, but its status was changed to that of an “oblast’” (province) in the RSFSR in 1945, ostensibly because the forced removal of the Crimean Tatars had eliminated the need for autonomy. After the Crimean oblast was transferred to the UkSSR in 1954, it retained the status of an oblast’ within Soviet Ukraine for 37 years. In early 1991, after a referendum was held in the UkrSSR and a resolution was adopted a month later by the UkrSSR parliament, the status of Crimea was upgraded to that of an “autonomous republic.” Crimea retained that designation within Ukraine after the Soviet Union broke apart. In the Russian Federation, however, the category of “autonomous republic” does not exist. In the treaty of annexation signed by the Russian and Crimean governments on 18 March 2014, the status of the peninsula was changed to simply a “republic” (Respublika Krym), joining 21 other “republics” of the Russian Federation’s now-85 federal “subjects,” with Crimea and the city of Sevastopol added as separate entities.[[3]
One of the ironies of the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 is that when the chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet, Kliment Voroshilov, offered his closing remarks at the session on 19 February 1954, he declared that “enemies of Russia” had “repeatedly tried to take the Crimean peninsula from Russia and use it to steal and ravage Russian lands.” He praised the “joint battles” waged by “the Russian and Ukrainian peoples” as they inflicted a “severe rebuff against the insolent usurpers.” Voroshilov’s characterization of Russia’s past “enemies” seems eerily appropriate today in describing Russia’s own actions vis-à-vis Ukraine. A further tragic irony of the Crimean transfer is that an action of sixty years ago, taken by Moscow to strengthen its control over Ukraine, has come back to haunt Ukraine today.
Mark Kramer is Director of the Cold War Studies Program at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow of Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
Me: “The Minsk Agreements I & II. Germany’s Angela Merkle, France’s François Hollande, and Ukraine’s Petro Oleksiiovych Poroshenko all admitted that they had no intention to ever implement the Minsk Agreements. That they used them only to buy time to build Ukraine’s military, train & arm them because war was in their future. Because they wanted to use Ukraine as the battlefield where the hostilities would be held, and the Ukrainians would become the combatants and the fodder for the Russian military. “
Where’s the proof for all that????
Poroshenko Admits. “Ukraine Was Never Going To Implement The Minsk Agreement.”
Angela Merkel and François Hollande’s crime against peace
Me: “Shortly after Russia invaded, Putin & Zelenskyy began engaging in talks for a peaceful resolution, which they had come to an agreement, that Russia would return all land thy controlled except for the Crimea, if Zelenskyy would declare Ukraine would remain neutral and not join NATO.”....”Then along came Boris Johnson who convinced Zelenskyy not to enter into a peace agreement claiming that Putin was a liar.”
“THEY” had not “come to an agreement”. The matters had been discussed but Ukraine had not made any agreement and Ukraine rejected the terms without any help from Boris Johnson
The overwhelming amount of what you believe is "truth" is actually propaganda.
Tucker Carlson did a great 2 hour 24 minute interview with Jeffrey Sachs.
https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-jeffrey-sachs
Voice typed 40 minutes
Meet you nonstop. 9 or 10 cups a day. It’s good. I like coffee. Yeah. And I drink it straight until minutes before bed. I do too. Ohh. Do you? Yeah. I will never drink as much as Voltaire. Drink. Yeah. Yeah. Ohh. Is that right? Like 40 cups? Yeah. Is that right? Ohh. Yeah. And it worked.
OK, so the, the one thing that we know we heard about the movement of Russian troops into eastern Ukraine in February of 2022 was it was unprovoked. Here’s a here’s a selection of what we know about that
Russian militaries began a brutal assault.People in Ukraine.Without provocation. Through without justification, without necessity.This is a premeditated attack.
Russia’s unprovoked and cruel invasion has galvanized countries from around the world.
Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified attack on Ukraine.
Russia conducted an unprovoked war. Aggression against Ukraine
was unprovoked.Russian war of aggression has got to be met with strength.
Vladimir Putin.Decided.Unprovoked.To start this war.
Tucker:
So.was it unprovoked
Jeffrey Sachs:well we did hear that a lot of times I I actually asked a research assistant of mine to count how many times we heard that in the New York Times in that first year from February 2022, February 2023. In their opinion, comes was 26 times unprovoked. Of course things aren’t unprovoked. It’s actually brand name unprovoked invasion. It’s it’s the lazy person’s dodge for actually trying to think through what’s going on. And it’s, and it’s very dangerous because it’s, it’s wrong. It gets the whole story completely wrong.And it misunderstands the trap that we set for ourselves as the United States to push Ukraine deeper and deeper and deeper into this hopeless mess that they’re in right now.
Tucker:
In what sense was it provoked? Like what started this?
Jeffrey Sachs:
Basically, it started very simply, which is that the United States government was. Let’s not call it the US people. They had nothing to do with this, but the US government said we’re going to put Ukraine on our side and we’re gonna go right up to that 2100 kilometer border with Russia and we’re going to put our troops in NATO and maybe missiles or whatever, because we are.The sole superpower of the world, and we do what we want. And it goes back, actually.A long way it goes back 170 years. The Brits had this idea first surround Russia, Black Sea region, Russia’s power anymore. And that was a Lord Palmerston’s idea in the Crimean War 1853 and 1856.And the bridge taught us what we know about empire, and they basically taught us the ideas. You know, it needs an outlet. It needs an outlet to the Middle East. It needs an outlet to with the Mediterranean. You surround Russia in the Black Sea.Uh, you have rendered Russia a second or third rate country
and.And speak bridging Ski I, one of our lead Geo strategists of the current era, wrote in 1997. Let’s do this. Let’s make sure that we basically surround Russia in in the black.The region, they got this idea that we’ll expand NATO so that every country in the Black Sea around Russia is a NATO country right now. Well, back then Turkey was a NATO country, but we said, OK, we’ll get Romania and Bulgaria and we’ll get you.Crane and we’ll get Georgia now Georgia you know not not our Georgia Atlanta, GA Georgia of the Black Sea we used to call it Soviet Georgia yes Soviet Georgia if you wanna call it that home of Stalin it it it it’s not NATO N Atlantic it’s it’s way out there in the eastern edge of of the Black Sea region people.Look at a map. But we said, yeah, we’ll make Georgia part of NATO too.
And the reason was very clear and and speak was very explicit about it that this is our way to basically dominate Eurasia. If we can dominate the Black Sea region, that Russia’s nothing. If we make Russia nothing, then we can basically control Eurasia, meaning all the way from Europe.Central Asia and through our influence in East Asia do the same thing. And that’s American unipolarity. We run the world. We are the hegemon. We are the sole superpower. We are unchallenged. So that’s the idea. It’s it’s
Tucker:
why would you want that? Why would the Brits want that? Why does?The US State Department want that.What? What about Russia, which is?Not actually much of an expansionist power is so threatening. Like it’s, it’s, it’s,
Jeffrey Sachs:
it’s not about Russia, it’s about the US. It’s, it’s about Britain before that I think is. It’s a little bit like that old game of Risk. I don’t know if you played yet as a kid, but you the idea was have your piece on every place in the world. You know that that was the game. And you read the American Strategist, whether it’s Big Bridge, Anski, although he’s a very moderate, or the neocons who have run US foreign policy.For the last 30 years, US the the neocons are very explicit. the US must be the unchallenged superpower.In every place in the world, in every region we must dominate. It’s quite a it’s quite a load for US American people. What they say is we are going to be the Constabulary. Constabulary duty holder would fancy word for saying will be the world’s policeman.
They they say it explicitly.They say that’s lots of wars. We have to be ready for all these wars to. In my mind it’s a little crazy, but their idea was after the end of the Soviet Union.Well, now we run the world and to come back to Russia, the idea was, well, Russia’s weak, it’s down, it’s worth the sole superpower. They’re they’re on, on their back or on their knees, whatever it is. And now we can move NATO where we want, we can surround them and.The Russians said please don’t do that. Don’t, don’t.Bring your troops, your weapons, your missiles right up to our border. It’s not a good idea and.The US,
I was around in those years, involved in in Russia and in Central Europe. the US was we don’t hear you. We don’t.We hear you, we do what we want. They kept pushing.Inside the US government in the 1990s, when this debate was going, should NATO expand? Some people said, yeah, But we told Gorbachev that. We told Yeltsin we weren’t going to expand it all. Yeah, come on. The Soviet Union’s done. We could do what we want with the sole superpower. Clinton bought into that.That was Madeleine Albright’s line.NATO enlargement started and our most sophisticated.Diplomats who we used to have diplomats at the time, we don’t have them anymore, but we used to have diplomats like George Kennan said. This is the greatest mistake we could possibly make. We had a Defense Secretary, Bill Perry, who was Clinton’s Defense Secretary, who agonized, God, I should resign over this. This is terrible. What’s going on?He was outmaneuvered diplomatically by Richard Holbrooke and by Madeleine Albright and Clinton never thought through anything systematically in my opinion.
And so they decided OK, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, first round and then Brezinski. In the 1997 article in Foreign Affairs magazine, which is kind of the bellwether of yes, Foreign Policy wrote A Strategy for Eurasia where he laid out exactly the timeline.For this US expansion of power and he said late 1990s will take in Central Europe, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic. By the early 2000s we’ll take in the Baltic states. Now that’s getting close to Russia. By 2005 to 2010, we’ll invite.Ukraine to become part of NATO.
So this wasn’t some flippant thing. This was a long term plan and was based on a long-term geostrategy. Now the Russians are saying, are you kidding? We wanted peace. We, we ended the Cold War Two. You didn’t just defeat us. We said no more. We disbanded the Warsaw Pact, that we wanted peace. We wanted cooperation. You call it victory. We, we just wanted to cooperate.
I know that for a fact because I was there in those years.What Gorbachev wanted, what Yeltsin wanted, they didn’t want war with the United States, nor were they saying we’re defeated. They were saying we just want to cooperate, We want to stop the Cold War. We want to become part of a world economy. We wanna be normal economy. We wanna be normal society, connected with you, connected with Europe, connected with Asia.Asia and the US said we get it, we get it, we won, you do everything we say and we determine how the pieces are gonna go.
So in the early 2000s.Putin comes in first.First business for Putin was good cooperation with Europe. Yeah. You go back to the early 2000s again. I know the people I watch closely. I was a participant in some of it. Putin was completely pro Europe, yes, the and, and pro US, by the way, you know, and, and we don’t want to.Talk about this. We don’t want to admit it because we don’t want anything other than unprovoked so.Everything is phony what we say, everything is a lie, but just to say.The US kept doing unilateral things.That were really outrageous in 2000. In 1999 we bombed Belgrade for 78 days. Bad move, Absolutely. We bombed a capital of Europe for 78 days.
Tucker:
What was looking back, what was the point of that?
Jeffrey Sachs:
The the point of that was to break Serbia into create a new state, Kosovo, where we have the largest NATO military base in. Southeast Europe, we put bond steel base there because we wanted a base in Southeastern Europe. And again you look at the neocons, it’s nice of them, they actually describe all of this in various documents. You have to make the links, but in a document called.I I rebuilding America’s defenses in the year 2000 they say the Balkans is a new strategic area for the US, so we have to move large troops to the Balkans because their ideas literally the game of risk, not just you need good relations or peace we need.Our pieces on the board, we need military bases with the, with the advanced positioning of our military everywhere in the world. So they wanted a big base in in southeastern Europe. They didn’t like Serbia. Serbia was close to Russia anyway. We’re the sole superpower. We do what we want, so.They divided the country which they now claim you never do, you know, you never change borders. We broke apart Serbia, established by our declaration a new country, Kosovo. We put a huge NATO base there. And that was the goal.
Tucker:
So that was 1999, to save the oppressed Muslim population.Excuse me, it wasn’t.And to save the oppressed Muslim college,
Jeffrey Sachs:
it was very, very much to save the military industrial complex, to have a nice. Location in southeastern Europe.
Tucker:
It killed all those people, wrecked the city.
Jeffrey Sachs:
you You know, it was a little bit sad, but we do lots of.Sad things and lots of destructive things. Lots of wars were the country of perpetual war. We don’t look back. We’re not even supposed to talk about this because this was unprovoked, remember? So in 2002, the US unilaterally pulled out of the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty. Unilaterally. Well, that was one of the stabilizers.Of the relationship with Russia and was one of the stabilizers of the the global nuclear situation, which is absolutely dangerous and the US unilaterally started putting.Aegis missiles into first Poland and Romania, and the Russians are saying that, wait a minute, what do we know? You’re putting in this your few minutes from Moscow. This is completely destabilizing. Do you think you might want to talk to us?
So then comes 2004, seven more countries in NATO, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Slovenia now.Starting filling in the Black Sea, Romania, Bulgaria, suddenly they are now N Atlantic countries. But it’s all part of this design, all spelled out, all quite explicit or surrounding Russia
in 2007, President Putin gave a very clear speech at the.Munich Security Conference.Very powerful, very correct.Very frustrated where? He said.Gentlemen.You told us in 1998 a would never enlarge. That was the promise made to President Gorbachev, and it was the promise made to President Yeltsin. And you cheated, and you repeatedly cheated. And you don’t even admit that you said this. But it’s all plainly documented.By the way, as you know in 1000 archival site, so it’s easy to to verify all of this. James Baker, the third our Secretary of State said that NATO would not move one inch eastward. And it wasn’t a flippant statement. It was a statement repeated and repeated and repeated.
Hans Dentrix.Enhance Etrigan, the foreign minister of Germany. Same story. The Germans wanted reunification, Gorbachev said. We’ll support that, but we don’t want that to come at our expense.No, no, it won’t come at your expense. NATO won’t move one inch eastward, Mr. President repeated so many times in many documents, many statements by the NATO Secretary General, by the US Secretary of State, by the German Chancellor, now, of course, all denied by.Our foreign policy BLOB, because we’re not supposed to remember anything. Remember, this was all unprovoked.
So back to 2007, Putin gives this speech. And he says stop.Don’t even think about Ukraine. This is our 2100 kilometer border. This is absolutely part of the integrated economy of this region that don’t even think about it. Now I know from insiders, from all the.Diplomatic work that I do that Europe was.Saying to the US, European leaders, don’t think about Ukraine, please, you know this is not a good idea. Just stop.
We know from our current CIA director, Bill Burns that he wrote a.Very eloquent, impassioned, articulate, clear.Secret, as usual, men.Uh, which we only got to see because WikiLeaks showed to the American people would maybe we would like to know once in awhile, but yeah, we’re never like what our government is doing, what they’re doing and how they’re putting us at nuclear risk and other things. Yeah, OK, This one did get out. It’s called me yet No means no.And what what Bill Burns very perceptively, articulately conveys to Condoleezza Rice and back to the White House in 2008 is Ukraine is really a red line. Don’t do it. It’s not just Putin. It’s not just Putin’s government. It’s the entire.Political class of Russia.
And just to help.All of us, as we think about it, it is exactly as if Mexico said umm. We think it would be great to have Chinese military bases on the Rio Grande, but we can’t see why the US would have any problem with that. Of course, we would go completely insane, but when we should?And we should. Of course, it’s the whole idea is so.Absurdly dangerous and reckless.That you you can’t even imagine.Grown-ups doing this
So what happens is.The what if what I’m told by European leaders and by long, detailed discussion.Bush.Junior says to them, no, no, no, it’s OK. Don’t, don’t, don’t worry. I hear you about Ukraine. And then he goes off for the Christmas holidays and comes back.Whether it’s Cheney, whether it’s Bush, whatever it is says yeah, NATO’s going to enlarge too crazy.And the Europeans are shocked. Missed. What are you doing?
Tucker:
You may have come to the obvious conclusion that the real debate is not between Republican and Democrat or socialist and capitalist. Right, left and the real battles between people who? Who are lying on purpose and people who are trying to tell you the truth. It’s between good and evil. It’s between honesty and falsehood. And we hope we are on the former side.That’s why I created this network of Tucker Carlson Network and we invite you to subscribe to it. You go to tuckercarlson.com/podcast. Our entire archive is there. A lot of behind the scenes footage of what actually happens in this barn when only an iPhone is running? tuckercarlson.com/podcast. You will not regret it.
Mixed voices:
Bush did not make that decision.Bush did not make the decision, right? I mean, it’s if I’m hearing what I’m saying, yeah, no, Bush did make this OK, but no. What I’m saying is he had told the Europeans, I hear you. I’m not gonna do it, but it sounds like he was.Influenced by the people around him. Ohh. No, that could be, yeah.
Jeffrey Sachs:
I don’t know what it was, CIA or whether someone explained to him or whether someone said, George, Mr. President, this is a longstanding project that, you know, it’s not something for European country to object to. I don’t know what happened there. But what I do know is that he came back and told the European leaders.we’re we’re doing it they said no no no no we’re not doing it and thenAnd then they had the NATO summit in Bucharest, and this was 2008.And the Europeans?A Chancellor, Merkel, I French President. All of them.George, don’t do this. Don’t do this. This is extraordinarily dangerous. This is really provocative. We don’t really need or want NATO right up to the Russian border.Bush pushed, pushed, pushed. This is a US alliance fundamentally, and they made the commitment. Ukraine will become a member of NATO.
The Dodge was OK. We won’t give them exactly the road map right now, but Ukraine will become a member of NATO.Because in those days, the US and Russia met in a NATO partnership even then.Putin was there the next day in Bucharest.Saying don’t do this. This is completely reckless. Essentially, this is our fundamental red line. Do not do this. the US can’t hear any of this. This is our biggest problem of all because the neocons who have run the.Go for 30 years believe the US can do whatever it wants. This is the most fundamental point to understand about US foreign policy. They’re wrong.
They keep screwing up, they keep getting us into trillion dollar plus wars. They keep keep killing a lot of people. But they’re basic belief is the US is the only.Superpower, it’s the unipolar power and we can do what we want. So they could not hear Putin even that moment. They couldn’t hear the rest of the Europeans. And by the way, they said Georgia would become part of NATO again. The only way to understand that is in this long standing. Palmerston Brezinski yes.If you reach this. This isn’t just haphazard. Ohh. Why don’t we take Georgia? This is a plan, OK? The Russians understand every single step of this.
So another thing goes awry.What goes awry? The Ukrainians don’t want NATO enlargement. The Ukrainians don’t want it. They’re against it. The public opinion said no, this is very dangerous neutrality. It’s safer. We’re in between east and West. We don’t want this. So they elect Victor Yanukovych, Yes, a president that says we’ll just be neutral.And that’s absolutely.The US is ohh what the hell is this, Ukraine? They don’t have any choice either so.Yanukovych becomes the enemy of the neocons, obviously,
So they start working, of course, the way that the US does. We gotta get rid of this guy. Maybe you will elect his opponent afterwards, maybe we’ll catch him in a crisis and so forth. And indeed, at the end of 2013, the US absolutely Stokes a crisis that becomes an insurrection and then becomes a coup. And I know again.From first hand experience, the US was implicated in that. But you can see our senators standing up in the crowd like if Chinese officials came to January 6th and said, yes, yes, go, you know, get, how would we like it if the, if, if Chinese leaders came and said, you know, we, we were with you 100%.American senators standing up in Kiev saying to the demonstrators, we’re with you 100%.
Victoria Newland famously passing around the cookies. But it was much, much more than the cookies, I can tell you. And so the US conspired.With a Ukrainian right to overthrow Yanukovych and there was a violent overthrow in the third week of February.Of 2014. That’s when this war started. This war didn’t even start in 2022. It started in 2014. That was the outbreak of the war was a violent coup that overthrew the Ukrainian president that wanted neutrality when he was violently overthrown and his security people told him.You’re going to get killed. And so he flew to her keep and then flew onward to Russia. That day, the US immediately, in a nanosecond, recognized the new government. None of this is a coup.
This is how the CIA does its regime change operations. So this is when the war starts. Putin’s.Understanding completely correct in this moment was.I’m not letting NATO take my naval fleet and my naval base in Crimea. Are you kidding?The Russian naval base in the Black Sea, which was the object of the Crimean War and in its way is the object of this war in Sebastopol, has been there since 1783 and now Putin saying.Our NATO’s gonna walk in.Hell no. And so they organized this referendum of the this is a Russian region and there’s an overwhelming support. We’ll stay with Russia. Thank you.
Do not with this new post coup government, an outbreak breaks out in the eastern provinces, which are the ethnic Russian provinces in the Donbass, in the Donbass and Lugansk and Donetsk.End.There’s a lot of violence, so the war starts in 2014. So saying something’s unprovoked in 2022 is a little bizarre for anyone that actually reads a normal newspaper to begin with. But in any event, the war starts then.And within a year.The Russians are saying.Very wisely, we actually don’t want this war.We don’t wanna own Ukraine. We don’t want problems on our border.We would like peace based on.Respect for the ethnic Russians in the east and political autonomy because you, the coup government, tried to close down all Russian language, culture and rights of these people after having made a violent coup. So we don’t accept that.
So what came out of that was two agreements called the Minsk One and the Minsk 2 agreement. The Minsk 2 agreement was backed by the UN Security Council and it said that we’ll make peace based on autonomy of the Donbass region. Now very interesting, the Russians.We’re not saying that’s ours. We want that. All the things that are claimed everyday that Putin just wants to recreate, You know, he thinks he’s Peter the Great. He wants to recreate the Russian Empire. He wants to grab territory, nothing like that. The opposite. We don’t want the territory. We actually just want autonomy.Based on an agreement reached with the Ukrainian government.
So what was the US attitude towards that U.S. government attitude? U.S. government attitude was to say to the Ukrainians.Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it. You keep your central state. We don’t wanna see Ukraine weakened at all. We just wanted NATO in a unified Ukraine. Don’t go for decentralization. We tell them to blow off the very treaty that they’ve signed. Then we accuse Russia of not having diplomacy.Anyway, which is, you know, par for the course. Ohh you can’t trust them.
We blow off every single agreement. We blow off not moving one inch eastward. We blow off the anti ballistic missile treaty. We.They have so many NATO LED wars of choice in between. I didn’t even mention in Syria CIA attempt to overthrow Assad in Libya and so forth and we blow off the Minsk agreements.
Had actually Anglo Merkel explained it rather shockingly frank interview that she gave last year.When asked why Germany didn’t help to enforce the Minsk agreement.Because Germany and France were the guarantors of the Minsk agreement under something called the Normandy Process, she said. Well, we just thought this was to give some time to the Ukrainians to build up their strength. In other words, they were guarantors of something in a phony way, and the US was.Uh, absolutely lying about this. And I know senior Ukrainians who were in government and who were around the government who said to me, Jeff, we’re not gonna do that anyway. That was at gunpoint, but we don’t have to agree with that. So all that diplomacy was blown off.
The war continued.The US pumped in arms, built up armaments, was building up what would be the biggest army of Europe after a huge army that Russia was watching. What are you doing? You know, you’re not honoring Minsk, You’re building up this huge Ukrainian army.Paid for by NATO, paid for by the United States. Basically yes and.In 2021, Putin met with Biden.and then after the meeting he put on the table a draft russia US West Security agreement put it on the table on December 15th, 2021. It’s worth reading. Very plausible document. I don’t agree with some of it. It’s it’s a negotiable document, something you wouldn’t negotiate.I thought the core of it was stop the NATO enlargement.And I called the White House myself at that point and.I said.Don’t have a war over this. Who’d you talk to? I talked to Jake Sullivan and they said don’t, don’t have a war over this. We don’t need NATO enlargement for US security impact. It’s countered to US security.
US should not be right up against the Russian border. That’s how we trip ourselves into World War 3.No, Jeff, don’t worry no more. There’s not going to be a war. Don’t worry, we we’ve got a diplomatic approach, said Jake. This is a basis for diplomacy. Negotiate.Well.B. Formal response of the United States is that issues about NATO are non-negotiable.They’re only between.NATO countries and NATO candidates, No third party has any stake or interest or say in this. Russia, it’s completely irrelevant. Again, to use the analogy, you know, if Mexico and China wanna put Chinese military bases on the Rio Grande, the United States has no right to interfere.No interest in it, no interest in it and no bilateral. And this was the formal US response in January 2022.
So unprovoked? Not exactly. So can I 30 years of provocation where we could not take peace for an answer One moment. All we could take is we’ll do whatever we want, wherever we want, and no one has.Any say in this at all?Suitcase go back.1212, I guess 22 years.
Tucker:
Putin told me, and I checked. I think it’s true that he and Clinton’s final days at.Asked Clinton if Russia could join NATO.Which seems almost by definition like a victory. You know, native exists as a bulwark against Russia. Russia wants to join the alliance they don’t want, right? Why would why would the US government have turned that offer down? And do you think that was that is real?
Jeffrey Sachs:
Russia and actually Europe. Wanted used to want before Europe was completely a kind of vassal province of the United States. Government wanted what they call collective security, which was we want security arrangements in which one country security doesn’t ruin the security of another country.And there were two paths to that, basically 3 paths. Let’s say. One path was what they called the OSCE, the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, really a good idea. It was its Western Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union. And the idea was let’s bring us all together under.One kind of charter and we’ll workout a collective security arrangement.
Tucker:
I liked it and hit this is what Gorbachev was saying. We don’t want war with you. We don’t want conflict with you. We want collective security.
Jeffrey Sachs:
2nd arrangement that actually makes a lot of sense, but people say is this guy out of his mind, but it actually makes a lot of sense.Gorbachev disbanded the Warsaw Pact. We should have disbanded, Maddox said. NATO was there to defend against a Soviet invasion. There’s not gonna be any Soviet invasion. In fact, after December 1991, there’s not even a Soviet Union. We don’t need NATO. Why is there NATO? NATO.Was established to defend against the Soviet Union, right? So I did it continue after Gorbachev and Yeltsin, the neocons, thankfully. Thank you. Read the document. It’s all explicit. This is our way of keeping our hegemony in Europe. In other words, this is our way of keeping.Our say in Europe, not protecting Europe’s, not even protecting us. This is hegemony. We need our pieces on the board. Natos are pieces on the board European.
Tucker:
Why would Germany allow foreign troops Garrison, Garrison on the soil for 80 years? I don’t understand why would European country allow that. Would you want foreign troops in our town?
Jeffrey Sachs:
Tucker, when, when, when you had your wonderful interview with Putin. He answered everything except once you asked him what did the Germans seeing in this and Putin said I don’t get it. And I thought Oh my God thank you I don’t get it either. You just broken by war guilt as it masochism I mean.Honestly, it’s not masochism. It’s not war guilt. There is. There are basic mechanisms that I don’t understand. Truly, after being around more than 40 years in this and knowing all the leaders, and I know Schultz and I know others, I don’t understand it. But when the US has a military base.In your country, it really pulls a lot of the political strings in your country, it really influences the political parties. It really pays. I know it’s, I’m naive, you know. In other words, the Germans are not.That they’re not free actors in this. That’s the point.
Tucker:
If men with guns showed up in your apartment in New York and just camped out there, you probably wouldn’t really be the head of your household anymore, would you?
Jeffrey Sachs:
It’s probably true, but you know you’re you’re. Question of why would the Germans want this?It’s the same question of after the US blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.Why wouldn’t the Germans have said before or after, umm, why did you do that? This is our economy you just blew up. But they don’t. And so there’s so subservient to the US interests.It’s a little hard to understand because it makes no sense for Europe, but like you said, you know there are people in your house. Maybe that’s the bottom line.
I’ve spoken to European leaders who have said to me, I can’t quote it because it’s so.Shocking and I won’t quote it because it was said confidentially, but be. Basically.They don’t take us seriously in Washington. And I said yes. I didn’t say it was the bubble over my head speaking to a European leader, but maybe if you pushed a little bit you could be you would be taken more seriously. Not in this way of just defeat, but it was said to me in such a sad way.Just help. Ohh God, don’t tell me that you’re a leader of in Europe and we’re occupying their country with soldiers and guns. How could we take them seriously? There are a *****. I mean, honestly, no, I don’t know.
It’s really sad and it’s it’s doing a lot of damage to.It’s it’s doing huge damage to Europe. It’s destroying Ukraine, by the way, that’s the first point. It’s destroying Ukraine’s doing a lot of damage to to Europe. It’s wasting a hell of a lot of lives and money in the United States, which the neocons don’t count.Umm, and almost nobody stands up and talks about it. And your first question about being unprovoked? We even have a story about it.
But it’s the stories complete bull. It’s complete nonsense. It’s for people who.Don’t want or don’t remember, don’t want to remember anything before February 24th the 2022. But there’s a whole long history to this that’s absolutely kind of absurd and tragic. I mean, it’s it’s absurd, it’s utterly tragic 500,000 Ukrainians dead for, nothing.
Tucker:
Do you think that’s the number?
Jeffrey Sachs:
I think that’s probably the number, yeah, that’s the best number that I know.
Tucker:
I mean, we talked about this at dinner, but one of the most shocking things, just as someone who lived in Washington, to me is.If you ask any of the senators for as I have, who voted to keep this work going with U.S. tax dollars, how many of your beloved Ukrainians have been killed, they have no idea.
Jeffrey Sachs:
They no interest in knowing, and they don’t care at all. And sometimes they say they don’t care, Mitt Romney said. You know, it’s greatest bargain, no American lives. **** Blumenthal said the same thing basically, this is a great part and no American lives they
Tucker:
doesn’t that evil. I mean at some point it would certainly have a critical they’re telling us we’re doing this for Ukraine, for our friends in Ukraine, the standard bearers or democracy, but also don’t you have an obligation to kind of care about the people you kill
Jeffrey Sachs:
I.I think so. You think so? I think Americans think so. I don’t think that the security apparatus thinks so because the security state, you know, you gotta be tough to play that game of risk. You gotta know, is there going to be some collateral losses? Some millions of people have died in American wars of choice. But if you’re a big boy, you can’t let that deter you.so i think it’s pretty deeply in