Another figure close to Pope Francis and the Vatican who has been pressing publicly for the immediate commencement of negotiations between Ukraine and Russia to end the bloodshed is Jeffrey Sachs, Ph.D., economist and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University.
Dr. Sachs, not a Catholic, was named by Pope Francis to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences in October 2021. But the Pope’s appeal to the necessity of dialog is one that Dr. Sachs — who was an economic adviser to both Russian presidents Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and Ukrainian President Kachuma, in the early 1990s after the demise of the Soviet system — echoes. In a December 6, 2022 interview with Democracynow.org — excerpted here — Dr. Sachs offered his rationale for the view that negotiations are a moral and practical imperative.
In it, he began by pointing out that “there is no military way out…”
“This war, like von Clausewitz told us two centuries ago, is politics by other means, or with other means, meaning that there are political issues at stake here, and those are what need to be negotiated.”
“What President Macron said is absolutely correct… One of the essential points we must address” — meaning we, the West — “as President Putin has always said, is the fear that NATO comes right up to its doors, and the deployment of weapons that could threaten Russia.” Much of this war has been about NATO enlargement, from the beginning… But President Biden, at the end of 2021, refused to negotiate over the NATO issue.
But now is the time to negotiate over the NATO issue. That’s the geopolitics at stake. There are other issues as well, but the point is, this war needs to end because it’s a disaster for everybody, a threat to the whole world. According to European Union President Ursula von der Leyen last week, 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died, 20,000 civilians. And the war continues.
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Of course, I should say, equally important is Ukraine’s sovereignty as a sovereign country and in need of security arrangements. But NATO as Ukraine’s security doesn’t work. It’s an explosive brew. So, one needs to find, as President Zelensky himself said earlier this year, before backing off from it, that there needed to be a non-NATO way to secure Ukraine. And there can be. […]
The third issue that is very consequential is Crimea… The peninsula in the Black Sea has been the home to Russia’s naval fleet, and therefore completely consequential for Russia’s economic and foreign policy and military security since 1783. […]
There was a delicate balancing act for many, many years, especially in the early 2010s. Then-President Viktor Yanukovych was negotiating with Russia to give, essentially, a long-term lease to Crimea to satisfy Russia’s security desires and needs as a balancing, as a delicate balancing. But the United States, very unwisely and very provocatively, contributed to the overthrow of Mr. Yanukovych in early 2014, setting in motion the tragedy before our eyes. And that ended that delicate balance. Russia said, “Crimea has to be ours, because we just saw that we can’t depend on a long-term arrangement with Ukraine. The United States contributed to the overthrow of a Ukrainian president who was negotiating with us over this core issue.”
So, my view is that — and almost everybody that discusses this in private understands — Crimea has been historically, and will be in the future, effectively, at least de facto Russian. And this cannot be the cause of World War III. […]
The last issue on the table is a real issue, and that is the ethnic divisions within Ukraine itself, given the complex history of this region and the piecing together of all of the countries of this region from various times in history. […]
On the western part, it’s ethnically Ukrainian, but complicated there, too. But on the east, which is the Donbas, Luhansk and Donetsk, the two regions that are the center of this war, these are predominantly Russian, ethnic Russian, Russian-speaking, Russian Orthodox, and, after Yanukovych’s overthrow, the place where paramilitaries demanded independence of these regions or joining Russia. And Russia supported those paramilitaries, and autonomous or independent states were declared.
What happened — and this is crucial to understand — is that, in 2015, there were agreements to solve this problem by giving autonomy to these eastern regions that were predominantly ethnic Russian. And these are called the Minsk agreements, Minsk I and Minsk II.
And in particular for Minsk II, the Europeans, especially France and Germany, said, “We will be guarantors of that.” But then, Ukraine, under the post-Yanukovych two presidencies, Poroshenko and Zelensky, refused to implement the Minsk II agreement, saying, “They’re dead. We don’t accept them. We don’t accept autonomy.” Russia said, “Well, you had a diplomatic agreement, and now this is violated.” […]
Ukrainian sovereignty, no NATO enlargement, de facto Russian control over Crimea, some kind of solution like Minsk II, some kind of autonomy, some solution for the Donbas — these are the four pieces that can save Ukraine, spare Russia, save the world from what is a growing disaster. And this is why we need a pragmatic approach.
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Putin calculated that the initial invasion would push Ukraine to the negotiating table, and these political issues would be resolved. And frankly, in March, after the February invasion, there were negotiations.[…]
Then the Ukrainians walked away from the negotiating table. We don’t know the full story to that. My own guess is that the U.S. and U.K. said, “You don’t have to compromise in that way.” There was a U.S. project for more than a decade to expand NATO, and I think there were forces in the administration that did not want to give up that project. And so Ukraine backed away from the negotiations, and the war went on. […]
This was a collision that is disastrous, and the cruelty of the Russian invasion is enormous. But the foolishness, recklessness of the U.S. neoconservatives to push to this point is also something that needs accounting for.
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