Breaking news about how the United States and England sabotaged a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia that would have kept the Ukraine conflict at least temporarily under control of Ukraine's President, Vladimir Putin. Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Link Lavelle explain why the deal was sabotaged, and why the U.S. and England are responsible for it. They also explain why NATO expanded to the east of the Ukraine border, putting Ukraine right in the crosshairs of Russian forces, and how the deal could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Professor Sachs is a world-renowned economist, professor, best-selling author, and innovative educator, and global leader in sustainable development. Link is a recent NYU graduate focusing on news, politics, and unfiltered opinions. He has more than 160 million views on TikTok, and is a First Amendment free speech advocate. You can reach him at link.lavelle@tikTok.co.uk and he is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, NPR, and the Wall Street Journal. He is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post. and has been featured in the Financial Times, CNN, CBS, and NPR, among other publications. He is the author of several books, including The War Room, and The Weekly Standard, and has written for The New York Review of Books, The Economist, The Financial Times and The Economist. His latest book, The New Republic, is out now, which is out in paperback. Thank you for listening to this episode of my podcast, Jeffrey Sachs, Jeffrey, and Link, Link, and I hope you do too! Subscribe to my podcast and share it with your friends and family! and tweet me what you think about it on Insta- if you liked it! Tweet me! ! to let me know what you thought of this episode and what you would like to hear me mention it in the next episode of this podcast! or comment about it in your feed! :) Timestamps: 4:00 - What do you think of it? 5:30 - What was your favorite part of the episode? 6:15 - Why did you think it was a good one? 7:40 - Is it better than the other? 8:00 9: What would you like it better? 11:15 12:20 - What are you looking forward to hearing about it?
00:00:00.000Hey everybody, I'm doing this special edition of my podcast today to talk about some breaking news about how the United States and England sabotaged the peace agreements in April of 2022, an existing peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia and Putin,
00:00:20.000that would have settled the Ukraine war and maintained Ukraine intact with a withdrawal of all the Russian troops, both sides had agreed on, and how the US and Boris Johnson sabotaged that agreement.
00:00:34.000Now, we've been talking about this, we've known about this.
00:00:38.000For some time we knew about it because of the negotiators, the senior negotiators, which are Natali Bennett, the former Prime Minister of Israel, and senior officials in Turkey.
00:00:51.000And in Germany, who had essentially refereed the negotiations.
00:00:58.000But now we know about it from a Ukrainian official named David Arikemia, who was the negotiator, who himself is a member of parliament, and he was a negotiator.
00:01:13.000about how Ukraine was ordered to tear up this agreement that would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
00:01:20.000And I have joining me today Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University.
00:01:26.000He is the world-renowned economist, professor, best-selling author, innovative educator, and global leader in sustainable development, and Link Lauren.
00:01:36.000Link Lauren is a recent NYU graduate focusing on news, politics, unfiltered opinions.
00:01:42.000He has more than 160 million views on TikTok.
00:01:46.000Link is a First Amendment free speech advocate.
00:02:04.000Of course, we've known about it, but to hear from The lead Ukrainian negotiator, the truth of this useless war in which the United States has wasted more than $100 billion and in which Ukraine has lost hundreds of thousands of people for nothing.
00:02:24.000And that's what we are learning right now.
00:02:27.000Now, the point of this is this war was a war because The neocons in the United States pushed NATO expansion, period.
00:02:38.000Did we really need to be NATO in Ukraine right on Russia's border?
00:02:57.000You know, there's an additional impetus for the expansion of Ukraine.
00:03:03.000As you know, in 1992, our country, the James Baker, the Secretary of State, committed to Gorbachev, who was doing something that was politically suicidal, that would mean that he will never be able to return to Russia again.
00:03:19.000He was trying to make peace in the world, a huge personal sacrifice to himself, to allow The unification of Germany, East and West Germany, under a NATO army.
00:03:29.000He had to withdraw 450,000 Soviet troops at the time, and he knew that he would never be forgiven by his own people, but he was doing something for world peace, which was dismantling the Soviet Empire and ending the Cold War and allowing us now supposedly to go forward and beat our swords into plowshares and enjoy prosperity rather than eternal conflict and war.
00:03:53.000And the one promise he asked in return from our government and from Britain was that if he allowed, under a hostile NATO army, the reunification of Germany to be occupied, move his army out, move our army in, we would never move NATO further to the east.
00:04:10.000And then, of course, in 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was the first of the neocons, published this blueprint for moving NATO, 1,000 miles to the east and 14 nations.
00:04:24.000So we know that the neocons wanted to do that essentially to provoke the destruction of Russia and further conflict with Russia.
00:04:34.000But the other impetus of this is that the military contractors themselves get a huge benefit because every time a new nation joins NATO, that new nation must conform its weapons purchases to NATO's specifications,
00:04:51.000which means buying from General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Ray Vion, Owen, and Lockheed, the people who are controlling our government, controlling our press, our media, Who are the real beneficiaries, financial beneficiaries of NATO expansion?
00:05:10.000So anyway, I just wanted to make that small.
00:05:12.000You know, by the way, of course, every point exactly right.
00:05:32.000And the German foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, said not one inch eastward.
00:05:39.000That's what they said about NATO. And then the neocons, of course, we don't have to do anything.
00:05:45.000You know, we don't have to follow anything.
00:05:47.000And they started the NATO enlargement.
00:05:49.000And just like you said, the committee to expand NATO in the mid-1990s, and you cannot make this up, was headed by the chief lobbyist of Lockheed.
00:06:01.000You know, it's just, they want to sell armaments.
00:06:05.000And this crazy thing, we had absolutely responsible public officials like William Perry, Clinton's Secretary of Defense, Who said to the president, don't do this?
00:06:50.000Now, this went on year after year, and Brzezinski, exactly, in 1997, spelled it out in a paper called The Strategy for Eurasia, and in a book, The Global Chessboard.
00:07:03.000And he said, we're going to move all the way to Ukraine.
00:07:06.000Ukraine with a 2,300-kilometer border with Russia.
00:07:43.000So this is, again, you can't be more provocative.
00:07:47.000Putin said in 2007, after another round of NATO enlargement that took NATO to the Black Sea, Romania and Bulgaria, that took NATO to the Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, that took NATO to the Balkan states, Slovakia and Slovenia, Putin said in 2007 at the Munich Security Summit, stop, please stop.
00:08:42.000So 2008 at the Bucharest NATO summit, Bush pushes the enlargement of NATO to Ukraine and Georgia, not our state of Georgia, the country, Georgia, at the eastern end of the Black Sea.
00:09:04.000This is Brzezinski's plan back in 1997 to surround Russia in the Black Sea, despite every warning Every senior responsible diplomat, Bill Burns, our current CIA director, then the ambassador to Moscow, sends a secret memo back called nyet means nyet, no means no.
00:09:29.000And what he explains in that memo to Condoleezza Rice, which we know thanks to WikiLeaks, otherwise, like everything else, it would be secret.
00:09:37.000He explains to Condoleezza Rice, it's the entire Russian political class.
00:09:44.000The entire Russian political class is saying it is absolutely reckless to push NATO into Ukraine, which itself is an ethnically divided country, divided on this issue.
00:09:55.000You will stir up the biggest hornet's nest imaginable.
00:10:00.000So our diplomats know this, but our politicians, they want to sell weapons, they want campaign contributions, they want the military-industrial complex.
00:10:09.000And then, who was the ambassador to NATO in 2008?
00:10:15.000And this, again, you can't make this stuff up.
00:12:54.000But what we see now, and I knew a lot of this because I've been involved in this region for a long time, at the end of 2021, President Putin one last time said, we need to negotiate.
00:13:10.000This NATO enlargement business is absolutely dangerous to us.
00:13:15.000Your missile placements are dangerous to us.
00:13:17.000He puts on the table on December 17th, 2021, A draft U.S.-Russia security agreement based on stopping NATO enlargement.
00:14:09.000They were relying on CIA assessments that said Russia was weak and would soon collapse and that they could negotiate reparations from Russia and all of this crazy stuff.
00:14:24.000Yeah, and Bobby, to me, having watched this close-up, To me, it's been like a poker game where I've been looking into the U.S. government hand.
00:14:44.000They think that this is either some supreme bluff Or they don't understand the basic rules of poker or the basic rules of geopolitics.
00:14:54.000And they have no idea what they're up against because they think, okay, our sanctions.
00:15:00.000Remember, that was once called the nuclear option, so-called, that we were going to cut Russia out of the swift banking system.
00:15:07.000Well, that really, that was a decisive end to the war.
00:15:11.000You know, they got it wrong at every single step.
00:15:15.000Now, what was revealed just now by this David Arakamiya, who is the head of Zelenskyy's party in the Ukrainian parliament, is something I've known from other insiders since that time, and it's the following.
00:15:32.000After December, Putin put a last offer on the table, and really an offer that made sense to negotiate.
00:15:41.000The US, Jake Sullivan, all the rest, no, we don't negotiate.
00:16:44.000In other words, there were four ministers who are from an ultra-right party for very powerful people in the government, and ultra-right is a very nice way of saying what they really are.
00:16:56.000And then the last thing that they wanted was to have...
00:17:39.000Nobody knows exactly what happened, but we kind of know what happened, which is Victoria Nguyen was pressuring him and the Nazis or the ultra-righters inside the Ukraine government were telling him they were going to kill him.
00:18:39.000Bobby, you know it better than anybody.
00:18:40.000Our government lies every moment beginning to end.
00:18:45.000And so one of the big lies of many in this war is this had nothing to do with NATO. This had nothing to do with NATO. Anyone who knows anything knows this was all about NATO. That was the essence of it.
00:18:59.000By the way, the Minsk agreement was an agreement for this autonomy of eastern Ukraine that was signed by the Ukrainians.
00:19:08.000That was endorsed, backed, committed 100% unanimously in the U.N. Security Council.
00:19:16.000And then the U.S. said, eh, you don't have to do it.
00:19:20.000So it was another part of the whole story.
00:19:23.000Just false promises from the U.S. side repeatedly.
00:19:28.000And until December 2021, they're not talking, Russia's not talking about taking territory.
00:19:35.000They're talking about enforce the Minsk agreement.
00:19:37.000No, you don't have to enforce the Minsk Agreement, the US says.
00:19:41.000And incidentally, this lie that we were told over and over, it has nothing to do with NATO, and I said it all the time, of course it's NATO. Oh, sacks, you, you know, Putin apologist and so forth.
00:19:53.000Listen to what the Secretary General of NATO said.
00:19:57.000Jens Stoltenberg said, I think by accident, a couple of months ago when he was speaking to the European Parliament, he says, and I'm quoting him, the background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021 and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign to promise no more NATO enlargement.
00:20:16.000That's what he sent us and was a precondition for not invade Ukraine.
00:20:24.000Stoltenberg says, of course we didn't.
00:20:25.000Why, of course, for heaven's sake, why not avoid a war that would kill a half a million Ukrainians, that would cost hundreds of billions of dollars?
00:20:34.000Of course we didn't sign it, says Stoltenberg.
00:20:37.000So what happens is, within a few days of this beginning of this operation in February 2022, when we're told, oh, he's trying to invade all of Ukraine and so forth, Zelensky says, okay, okay, we'll talk.
00:21:24.000And now, this goes on, they come close to signing.
00:21:28.000Actually, Naftali Bennett, who you mentioned, the former Prime Minister of Israel, he's an informal intermediary.
00:21:35.000The Turks In Ankara, who are very skilled diplomats in the Black Sea region for many hundreds of years, are mediating, and they're basically at an agreement.
00:21:57.000He says we would not accept neutrality.
00:22:00.000We were told not to accept neutrality.
00:22:03.000We were told by Bojo, Boris Johnson, who came in person, but he's carrying the message for the big boys and the big girls, for Newland and the neocons and Biden.
00:22:23.000And after that happened, Bobby, I... I was so discouraged because the end of the war was in sight.
00:22:31.000I flew to Ankara to meet with the negotiators and I had a long discussion with them about all of this and I knew this story.
00:22:41.000And then Naftali Bennett comes out in an interview.
00:22:45.000He explains the whole thing and it's crazier Then we think it's crazy because the United States tells them, tells Bennett and tells the Ukraine, no, you fight on and we have to show strength to China.
00:22:59.000Can you believe even China enters this crazy mindset of these people?
00:23:31.000Bobby, can I read you something that comes out of our Armed Services Committee, my former party, the Democratic Party, which I have left because of the same reason.
00:23:47.000This is what Richard Blumenthal Published recently in the Kinetic Post, his hometown newspaper in late August, he writes, even Americans who have no particular interest in freedom and independence in democracies worldwide should be satisfied that we're getting our money's worth on our Ukraine investment.
00:24:09.000For less than 3% of our nation's military budget, we've enabled Ukraine to degrade Russia's military strength by half.
00:24:16.000We've united NATO and caused the Chinese to rethink their invasion plans for Taiwan.
00:24:23.000We've helped restore faith and confidence in American leadership, moral and military, all without a single American service woman or man, injured or lost, and without any diversion or misappropriation of American aid.
00:24:38.000It's utter moral and intellectual bankruptcy.
00:25:28.000That's a very good segue to, Link, because, Link, you've been following very closely the Biden administration's recent policies and this flurry of visits from the Biden White House by high-level officials.
00:26:11.000Then they had that big aid package Biden wanted for like $106 billion.
00:26:15.000$61.4 billion was supposed to be for Ukraine.
00:26:19.000Somebody working at a gas station in the United States, they don't want their tax dollars going to fund a war in Ukraine that they don't see going anywhere.
00:26:28.000And then 60 Minutes, on September 25th, 60 Minutes does an episode, and it's to sell the war in Ukraine.
00:26:33.000In 60 Minutes, they just did a softball with Biden, they did a softball with Kamala Harris, all talking about how we have to support our allies and our friends in Ukraine.
00:27:07.000Well, when Americans, the populist America, saw that, they were outraged.
00:27:12.000Why are our tax dollars paying to keep small businesses open so they can sell scarves and sweaters when we lost millions of our own small businesses during a pandemic that have never recovered?
00:27:22.000And it's just this sales job over and over and over with the war in Ukraine, and it's going nowhere and it doesn't advance American interest.
00:27:41.000And maybe, Jeffrey, you can explain this.
00:27:42.000What does Mayor Pete, the Secretary of Transportation, have any business to do with Ukraine?
00:27:47.000Why is he making trips to hang out with Zelensky?
00:27:50.000And then Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, the Pentagon, they just failed their sixth audit in a row, right?
00:27:56.000The Pentagon has never passed an audit.
00:27:57.000The next day, Lloyd Austin makes a surprise trip to Ukraine to shake hands with Zelensky, to do a photo op, to give a speech in front of Zelensky, wherever he lives.
00:28:25.000I'm representing a thousand families in East Palestine.
00:28:28.000Ohio, and President Biden has never been there to visit these people whose lives were devastated and upended by the Norfolk Southern spill.
00:30:58.000Interest rates on a 30-year mortgage have hit 8%.
00:31:03.000You know, we've got a real issue here, but that also doesn't register.
00:31:09.000They're just completely, they've lost it because this is a project of a small group that has so misplayed things Basically, for 30 years, it's been wrongheaded from the start.
00:31:30.000They keep lying to us, even though the truth now comes out.
00:31:33.000It comes out from the NATO Secretary General.
00:31:35.000It comes out from the Ukrainian negotiator.
00:31:38.000I, as someone who sees it from the inside, I've known this all along, but now you hear these voices clearly stating absolutely, vividly what's happening.
00:32:02.000He's been deeply into this, and it's just absolutely awful.
00:32:07.000Let me ask you one other thing, Jeffrey, and then I'm going to let you guys go, because the shorter we keep these things, the better they do, I find.
00:32:14.000You know, we've committed $113 billion over there, and I think another $24 billion that we committed last summer.
00:32:25.000Where is that money going besides U.S. military contractors?
00:32:28.000When it gets there, I mean, is Zelensky getting rich?
00:32:32.000Are people in his government getting rich?
00:34:10.000Yeah, and I wanted to hop in here because a lot of people forget Ukraine is the number two most corrupt country in all of Europe, right?
00:34:18.000So when we're sending billions and billions of dollars to a country that's already number two most corrupt in all of Europe, it gives me a little bit of pause, right?
00:34:25.000And then Time Magazine, you know, they just did a whole piece in time.
00:34:29.000And they apparently interviewed some of Zelensky's top advisors, and you guys can go find the issue.
00:34:34.000In the issue, Zelensky's top advisors say he's deluded, he's lost the plot, he's turned into a madman, he's going a little stir-crazy.
00:34:41.000They also say, and I quote, people are stealing like there's no tomorrow.
00:34:45.000So when Americans hear this, and they're struggling to keep their small businesses open, and Zelensky's advisors say people are stealing like there's no tomorrow in the number two most corrupt country in Europe, Why can't we end this?
00:34:57.000Let's end it and put a period on the sentence once and for all.