“Can you not find anything negative to say about Putin?”

Piers Morgan:  First of all, your reaction to the election of Vladimir Putin?

Jeffrey Sachs. It’s a Russian tradition.  He’s a strong leader, the Russians expect a strong leader and we have to deal with a strong leader in Russia.

PM The Wall Street Journal recently put you first among Putin cheerleaders, how do you feel about that?

JS My point has been for years, avoid this war, stop this war in Ukraine, it’s not a matter of cheerleading, it’s a matter of common sense.  I go back to this issue for more than 30 years, I was an economic adviser to President Gorbachev’s team and then President Eltsine’s team and President Kuchma’s team in Ukraine, so I’ve known this landscape for more than 30 years and my view is that this war was completely avoidable and could have been ended in March 2022, but it persists because we don’t have a sensible approach. 

PM But the reality is that Putin always wanted to lay his hands in Ukraine, he now has his hands on Ukraine by invading illegally a sovereign democratic country; despite what he says about NATO encroachment, that’s precisely why Ukraine wanted to be a member of NATO, and perhaps the biggest mistake it made was to give up its nuclear weapons.

JS  I think Ukraine should have been a neutral buffer between Russia and NATO and that’s how it started out as an independent state in 1991; the US had its eye on getting the Ukraine in its orbit already from 1992, Brzezinski spelt it out in 1997, many people thought this was a path to disaster and it’s turned out to be a path to disaster.  It’s very sad, it could have been peaceful and neutral and independent, but that wasn’t good enough for the United States.  I fully understand why Russia wouldn’t want NATO on its 2000 km border with Ukraine.  So it’s very sad and very predictable.

Our current head of the CIA, Bill Burns, when in 2008 he was ambassador to Russia he sent a famous memo “Niet means Niet” No!, don’t do it, it’s not just Putin, it’s the entire political class that rejects Ukraine in NATO and we should have been prudent, but we’re not very prudent; we had our designs and we walked into a disaster, but more than that, we talked Ukraine into a complete disaster.

PM The other way of looking at this is that Ukraine wanted to be an independent sovereign country; Putin didn’t want that, he grabbed Crimea and parts of Ukraine, because he is a pathological liar and a homicidal maniac.

JS Piers, the real screw up by the US was not just pushing NATO, but participating in the overthrow of Yanukovych in February 2014.  We overthrew a government and the United States played a major role in that.  I happened to see some of it first hand, it was pretty standard stuff, this is what the US does when it doesn’t like a government: it stirs things up, it puts in a lot of money, funds unrest, stokes unrest; it did that in February 2014, it really was a huge mistake, a supposedly covert but not very covert regime change operation, and it was the path to the disaster that we’re in just now.

So we have two sides playing a lot of games, but for the United States to be pushing so hard to Russia’s borders was premeditated and stupid, really stupid.  It got us into this mess and you could see it coming so clearly for the last 10 years.  I begged the White House many times : “Avoid the war! Stop!  Tell them NATO’s not coming, Ukraine will do just fine” and they wouldn’t do it, because this has been a United States project for the past 30 years, this has been a long-standing game, announced and explained, Brzezinski laid it all out for us in 1997.

PM  What is your view of Vladimir Putin?

JS  I think he’s very smart, very tough, I think he says what he means, in 2007 he said: “Don’t do this” at the Munich Security Conference.  The US had said they would not expand NATO; then they expanded under Clinton to Hungary, Poland the Czech Republic, then to seven more countries in 2004: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Slovakia and in 2007 Putin said “Stop! No more, and not to Ukraine.”  So in 2008 GW Bush at Bucharest guarantees entry to NATO to Ukraine and Georgia.  This is Palmerston’s playbook from 1853, surround Russia in the Black Sea again.

PM Just to interrupt, I’ve just asked for your view of Putin, all you’ve said is he’s smart and tough; any negatives Professor?

JS I believe that the big mistake of both sides is we should talk this out.  In 2008 when Bucharest happened European leaders called me, because I’m friends with them, they said, what is your crazy president doing?  (By the way some that are in power now—I won’t’ name names), he promised he wasn’t going to push Ukraine.  This is what European leaders say in private, they won’t say it in public.

Then 2014 happened.  Sadly, Piers, I saw it first hand, it was ugly, the United States should not be funding overthrows of government.  I was there shortly afterwards, with the new government hand-picked by Victoria Newland.  We didn’t talk then; then came the Minsk Agreements.  The UN Security Council backed both Minsk 1 and Minsk 2, Germany and France were the guarantors —Angela Merkel said later they had not taken them seriously.  Then on 15 December 2021 Putin put it down in a joint US-Russia security agreement.  I read it, I called the White House, told them they could negotiate on that basis and avoid the war.  I said, just tell them NATO won’t come nearer.  They refused.

Then the war started.  Zelensky said OK we can be neutral and negotiations started.  The US stopped the agreement, Why?  Because they thought, we’ll win, with our sanctions, cutting them out of the banking system, we’re going to bring them to their knees.  It’s a bunch of terrible miscalculations.  It’s a game, a terrible game.

PM What about Putin, you’ve only called him smart and tough; this is a guy that kills his political opponents, he rules his country like a gangster, I’m struggling to understand why you can’t find any negatives for the guy, he’s a dictator.

JS  Because I’m trying to find peace and you don’t do that by doing what Biden is doing, calling him a thug and a crazy SOB: that’s not getting us where we want to be.  We have hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians dead.

At the time of the Cuban missiles crisis, JF Kennedy didn’t call Khrushchev names, he tried to save peace. Afterwards he didn’t insult  Khrushchev, he sat down with him and negotiated a partial nuclear test ban treaty.  We’re not in a cage brawl, we’re trying to stop the world from spiralling into a nuclear war.  The game is, sit down and negotiate. 

PM Your critics say you are a purveyor of anti-American talking points; you’ve been praising Putin’s strength and you’ve been pretty critical of America, but you don’t seem to want to say anything critical of Putin or Russia.

JS I am an American, and I follow Jesus’s foreign policy advice, which is: why point at the mote in the other’s eye and ignore the beam in your own?  I want us to do better.  I want us to negotiate and make peace; I don’t believe name calling is the way to solve problems in the nuclear weapons age.