What Russia proposed in Istanbul in March 2022
by Jeffrey Sachs
[This article posted on 6/26/2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.telepolis.de/features/Was-Russlands-im-Maerz-2022-in-Istanbul-vorgeschlagen-hat-9778854.html.]
Moscow is probably open to negotiations. But they would result in territorial losses for Kiev. But what is the alternative? A plea (Part 2 and conclusion)
In the first part of this article, Jeffrey Sachs writes about the various attempts to end the war in Ukraine. According to this author, Russia has made various proposals. Sachs is a well-known critic of US policy on this issue, and his theses are the subject of controversy.
Read part 1 here:
Ukraine War: Why does the USA not want a negotiated peace?
Telepolis
Sachs writes that Russia has proposed negotiating security arrangements with the US for the fifth time since 2008. NATO, led by the US, has steadily expanded its alliance to the east, which has contributed to the current crisis in Ukraine. Now the second part of his analysis.
Putin's fourth offer of negotiations came in March 2022, which led to Russia and Ukraine almost concluding a peace agreement just a few weeks after the start of the Russian military operation, which began on February 24, 2022.
Russia proposed again: neutrality of Ukraine, i.e. no NATO membership and no stationing of US missiles on the Russian border.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accepted Ukraine's neutrality, and Ukraine and Russia exchanged the documents they had drafted, with the competent mediation of the Turkish Foreign Ministry. Then, at the end of March, Ukraine suddenly broke off the negotiations.
Jeffrey David Sachs is an American economist and professor at Columbia University.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who was probably influenced by the British anti-Russian warmongering during the Crimean War (1853-1856), flew to Kiev to warn Zelenskyy against accepting Ukraine's neutrality and to convince him that Ukraine could defeat Russia on the battlefield.
Since then, Ukraine has lost around 500,000 dead soldiers and is on the losing side on the battlefield.
Russia's fifth offer of negotiations on June 14, 2024
Russia has now made a fifth offer of negotiation, which Putin himself explained in his speech to diplomats at the Russian Foreign Ministry on June 14. In it, Putin set out the conditions proposed by Russia for ending the war in Ukraine.
"Ukraine should adopt a neutral, non-aligned status, be nuclear-free and undergo demilitarization and denazification," Putin said.
Broad agreement in Istanbul
These provisions were largely agreed during the Istanbul negotiations in 2022, including specific details on demilitarization such as the agreed number of tanks and other military equipment. A consensus was reached on all points at that time.
"Of course, the rights, freedoms and interests of Russian-speaking citizens in Ukraine must be fully protected," Putin continued.
The disputed territories
Furthermore, the new territorial realities, including the status of the People's Republics of Crimea, Sevastopol, Donetsk and Lugansk and the regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia as parts of the Russian Federation, should be recognized.
These basic principles would have to be laid down in future by fundamental international agreements. This would also mean the lifting of all Western sanctions against Russia.
What are the upcoming negotiations about?
Let me conclude by saying a few words about the negotiations themselves and about the proposals that are on the table. First of all, Russia's proposals must be answered with proposals from the US and Ukraine.
The White House is completely wrong to refuse to negotiate just because it does not agree with Russia's proposals. It should put forward its own proposals and get down to work negotiating an end to the war.
The core issues
For Russia, there are three core issues: the neutrality of Ukraine (no NATO expansion), the retention of Crimea by Russia and border changes in eastern and southern Ukraine.
The first two of these core issues are almost certainly non-negotiable for Russia.
Please also read
Ukraine war: Is NATO's eastward expansion at the heart of the conflict?
Telepolis
Ukraine war: Why does the US not want a negotiated peace?
Telepolis
The desired NATO expansion to include Ukraine (and Georgia) is the fundamental casus belli and therefore an end to this objective is indispensable for Russia. Crimea is also of central importance to Russia, as the Russian Black Sea Fleet has been stationed there since 1783 and is of fundamental importance for Russia's national security.
The borders in the south and east
The third core issue, the borders in eastern and southern Ukraine, could be a central point of negotiation.
After NATO bombed Serbia in 1999 to split Kosovo from Yugoslavia, and after the US put pressure on the Sudanese government to give up South Sudan, the US should not act as if borders are always inviolable in the upcoming negotiations.
Rather, the borders of Ukraine must be redrawn as a result of the 10-year war there, the situation on the battlefield, the decisions of the local population and the compromises reached at the negotiating table.
Refusal to negotiate until nuclear Armageddon?
President Biden should also accept that negotiations are not a sign of weakness. As Kennedy put it, "Never negotiate out of fear, but never be afraid to negotiate".
Ronald Reagan paraphrased his own negotiating strategy with a Russian proverb: "Trust, but verify".
The neoconservative approach to Russia, which has been delusional and presumptuous from the outset, is now in ruins.
The fallacies
NATO will never be able to expand to include Ukraine and Georgia.
Russia's president will not be toppled by a covert CIA operation.
Ukraine often has to mourn 1,000 or more dead and wounded on the battlefield in a single day. And the failed neoconservative game plan is bringing us ever closer to nuclear Armageddon.
Yet Biden still refuses to negotiate. After Putin's latest speech, the US, NATO and Ukraine again firmly rejected negotiations.
Defeat Russia?
Biden and his team have not yet abandoned the neoconservative fantasy of defeating Russia and expanding NATO into Ukraine.
The Ukrainian people have been lied to repeatedly by Zelensky, Biden and other NATO leaders who have falsely and repeatedly told them that Ukraine could win on the battlefield and that there was no possibility of negotiation.
Ukraine is now under martial law and the Ukrainian public there has no say in the slaughter to which it continues to be subjected.
For the sake of Ukraine's survival and to prevent a nuclear war, the President of the United States has only one overriding obligation today: to negotiate.
This article by Jeffrey D. Sachs, entitled "Why Won't the US Help Negotiate a Peaceful End to the War in Ukraine? For goodness' sake, negotiate!" was published on June 19, 2024 on the US website Common Dreams. This text was translated into German by Klaus-Dieter Kolenda with the permission of the author and provided with some subheadings.
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Dangers and hopes of an emerging multipolar world
by Jeffrey D. Sachs
[This article posted on 6/10/2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.telepolis.de/features/Gefahren-und-Hoffnungen-einer-entstehenden-multipolaren-Welt-9755728.html.]
The world economy is undergoing profound change. Countries that were once left behind in the industrialization process are now being upgraded. This has significant consequences. A guest article.
The publication on May 30 of the World Bank's latest estimates on the development of national production capacities up to 2022 is an occasion to reflect on the new geopolitical situation.
The new data underline the shift from a US-led to a multipolar world economy, a reality that US strategists have so far failed to recognize and acknowledge. However, the World Bank's figures make it clear that the economic dominance of the West has come to an end.
The era of Western economic dominance is over
In 1994, the Western G7 countries, which include Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, accounted for 45.3 percent of global goods production, compared with 18.9 percent for the BRICS countries, which include Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Russia, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates.
The tables have now turned. The BRICS countries now produce 35.2 percent of world output, while the G7 countries only produce 29.3 percent.
Since 2022, the five largest economies have been, in descending order, China, the US, India, Russia and Japan. China's GDP (gross domestic product) is about 25 percent larger than that of the US. Per capita, it is about 30 percent of the US's GDP, but with a population 4.2 times larger.
Today, three of the five largest economies are members of the BRICS, while only two of them are members of the G7. Compared to 1994, the situation has also changed here. 30 years ago, the USA, Japan, China, Germany and India were the five largest economies, three of which were still members of the G7 and only two of which were members of the BRICS.
The global influence of the USA is waning
As the shares of the world economy have changed, so have the global power relations.
The core alliance led by the USA, which includes the USA, Canada, the UK, the European Union, Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand, accounted for 56 percent of global production in 1994; today it is only 39.5 percent.
As a result, the global influence of the United States is waning. A recent illustrative example of this is that when the US-led group introduced economic sanctions against Russia in 2022, very few countries outside the core alliance joined in these sanctions. As a result, Russia had little trouble shifting its trade to countries outside the US-led alliance.
Worldwide convergence in economic activity
The global economy is undergoing a profound process of mutual economic rapprochement, also known as convergence, whereby regions that lagged behind the West in terms of industrialization in the 19th and 20th centuries are now catching up on lost time.
Economic convergence actually began in the 1950s, when European imperial rule in Africa and Asia came to an end. It has developed in waves, first in East Asia, then about 20 years later in India, and in the next 20 to 40 years it will also happen in Africa.
These and some other regions are growing much faster than Western economies today because they have more "room to grow" in terms of GDP by rapidly raising educational levels, improving the skills of their workers, and installing modern infrastructure, including universal access to electrification and digital platforms.
Emerging markets are often able to leapfrog wealthier countries with cutting-edge infrastructure (e.g. high-speed intercity rail, 5G, modern airports and seaports), while wealthier countries face aging infrastructure and expensive upgrades.
The International Monetary Fund's World Economic Outlook predicts that emerging and developing countries will achieve average growth of around four percent per year over the next five years, while high-income countries will achieve less than two percent per year on average.
Emerging markets such as China are making rapid progress
Convergence is not only taking place in economic capabilities and infrastructure. Many emerging economies, including China, Russia, Iran and others, are also making rapid progress in technological innovation, both in civil and military technologies.
China clearly has a huge lead in the production of cutting-edge technologies needed for the global energy transition, including batteries, electric vehicles, 5G, photovoltaics, wind turbines, fourth-generation nuclear energy and others.
China's rapid advances in space technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology and other technologies are similarly impressive. In response, the US has made the absurd claim that China has an "overcapacity" in these cutting-edge technologies, while the obvious truth is that the US has a significant undercapacity in many sectors.
China's ability to innovate and produce at low cost is underpinned by huge spending on research and development and its huge and growing number of scientists and engineers.
US continues to pursue strategy of "hegemony" – but to no avail
Despite the new global economic realities, the US security state is still pursuing its grand strategy of "hegemony". This is the US's aspiration to be and remain the dominant economic, financial, technological and military power in every region of the world.
The US is still trying to maintain this dominance in Europe by surrounding Russia in the Black Sea region with NATO troops, but Russia has militarily resisted this both in Georgia and in Ukraine.
The US is still trying to maintain its dominance in Asia by surrounding China in the South China Sea, a foolish move that could lead the US into a catastrophic war over Taiwan.
The US is also losing its standing in the Middle East by defying the Arab world's collective call for the recognition of Palestine as the 194th member state of the United Nations.
But maintaining a hegemony is certainly no longer possible today, and it was presumptuous even 30 years ago, an expression of hubris when the relative power of the US was much greater.
US hegemony not expected to be replaced by Chinese hegemony
Today, the US accounts for 14.8 percent of global production, compared with 18.5 percent for China, and the US accounts for only 4.1 percent of the world's population, compared with 17.8 percent for China.
However, the trend towards broad global economic convergence does not mean that US hegemony will be replaced by Chinese hegemony.
In fact, China's share of world output is likely to peak at around 20 percent of world GDP in the next decade and then decline as China's population declines.
Other parts of the world, especially India and Africa, will then probably see a sharp increase in their respective shares of global production and thus also in their geopolitical weight.
The emergence of a post-hegemonic, multipolar world
We are therefore entering a post-hegemonic, multipolar world that is also full of challenges.
A new "tragedy of great power politics" could begin, with several powerful states that are also nuclear powers competing in vain for hegemony. This could lead to a collapse of fragile global rules, such as those of open trade within the framework of the WTO, the World Trade Organization.
Further articles by Jeffrey D. Sachs:
The lust of US presidents for nuclear Armageddon
Telepolis
Continued colonialism: Why London and Washington are preventing Palestine from becoming a UN member
Telepolis
But it could also lead to a world in which the major powers, in accordance with the UN Charter, practise mutual tolerance, restraint and even cooperation, because they recognize that in the nuclear age only a policy guided by reason, which seeks to balance interests, can keep the world livable for everyone and save it from destruction.
Jeffrey Sachs (1954, Detroit, Michigan) is an American economist and professor. He received his doctorate in economics from Harvard University in 1980. Sachs' career has been marked by various academic positions and advisory roles for major international organizations such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WTO).
As director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and as a professor, he is deeply committed to sustainable development. Sachs is particularly well known for his decisive role in the development of economic policies in Eastern Europe during the transition from communism to capitalism. He is considered an advocate of global poverty reduction.
Sachs's achievements in economics have earned him numerous awards and honors. His work and his commitment to a more just global economy have extended his influence far beyond the boundaries of academia. In "The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity" (2011), he addresses issues of US society and economy.
Telepolis has recently published a series of enlightening and courageous articles by Sachs on the background, course and effects of the Ukraine war and the Israeli war in Gaza.
Like Mearsheimer, Sachs is one of the outstanding US academics who take a clear, realistic and very critical stance on these wars and the disastrous US foreign policy.
The present article by Jeffrey D. Sachs, entitled "The Perils and Promise of the Emerging Multipolar World", was published on June 6, 2024 on the US website Common Dreams. This text was translated into German with the permission of the author and provided with some subheadings.
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Ukraine War: Why does the US not want a negotiated peace?
June 25, 2024 Jeffrey D. Sachs
[This article posted on 6/25/2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.telepolis.de/features/Ukraine-Krieg-Warum-wollen-die-USA-keinen-Verhandlungsfrieden-9776574.html.]
Our author calls for dialogue to end the war in Ukraine. Rejecting peace negotiations will only bring more death. A plea. (Part 1)
For the fifth time since 2008, Russia has now proposed to negotiate security arrangements with the United States, this time with proposals that President Vladimir Putin presented on June 14, 2024.
Read part 2 here
What Russia proposed in Istanbul in March 2022
Telepolis
The US has already rejected a negotiation offer four times before, in favor of the strategy of the US neoconservatives, whose goal is the continued weakening or even dismemberment of Russia through war and covert operations.
But the neoconservatives have failed catastrophically. Their strategy has led to the devastation of Ukraine and put the whole world at risk. After all the warmongering, it is time for Biden to start peace negotiations with Russia.
In the second part of this article, Jeffrey Sachs describes how Russia was close to a peace agreement in March 2022, after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky agreed to Russia's demand for Ukraine's neutrality. But the negotiations were abruptly broken off, allegedly after a visit by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who convinced Zelensky that a military victory over Russia was possible. Sachs is a well-known critic of US policy on this issue, and his theories are the subject of heated debate.
US plan: permanently weaken and dismember Russia
Since the end of the Cold War, the fundamental strategy of the USA has been to weaken Russia. As early as 1992, the then US Secretary of Defense, Richard Cheney, said that Russia should also be dismembered after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Jeffrey David Sachs is an American economist and professor at Columbia University.
In 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski argued that Russia should be divided into three loosely confederated entities in Russian Europe, Siberia and the Far East.
In 1999, the US-led NATO alliance bombed Serbia, which was allied with Russia, for 78 days in order to divide that country as well and establish a huge NATO military base in the secessionist Kosovo.
The leaders of the US military-industrial complex vociferously supported the Chechen war waged against Russia in the early 2000s.
To back up the US attacks on Russia, Washington aggressively pushed for NATO expansion, even though Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin had been promised that NATO would not expand one inch east of Germany.
The US pushed hardest for NATO expansion to include Ukraine and Georgia because they were obsessed with the idea of completely encircling the Russian naval fleet in Sevastopol and Crimea with the NATO states of Ukraine, Romania (a NATO member since 2004), Bulgaria (a NATO member since 2004), Turkey (a NATO member since 1952) and Georgia.
This was an idea that came directly from the script of the British Empire in the Crimean War of the 19th century (1853 to 1856).
In 1997, Brzezinski drew up a possible chronology of NATO expansion, which was to include Ukraine's membership of NATO between 2005 and 2010. Accordingly, the USA proposed Ukraine and Georgia's membership at the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008.
By 2020, NATO had indeed expanded to include exactly 14 countries in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. These are the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland in 1999, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004, Albania and Croatia in 2009, Montenegro in 2017 and North Macedonia in 2020. Ukraine and Georgia were promised future membership in 2008.
In short, the 30-year US project, originally launched by Cheney and the neoconservatives and consistently pursued by the West ever since, is to weaken and even dismember Russia, surround Russia with NATO troops, and at the same time present Russia in its propaganda as a particularly belligerent power.
Russia: Security agreements the goal
Against this gloomy backdrop, the Russian leadership has repeatedly proposed negotiating security agreements with Europe and the United States that would provide security for all the countries concerned, not just the NATO bloc.
However, guided by the neo-conservative game plan, the US has refused to negotiate at every opportunity, while trying to blame Russia for the lack of agreements in this area.
In June 2008, for example, as the US was preparing to expand NATO into Ukraine and Georgia, then Russian President Dmitri Medvedev proposed a European Security Treaty, calling for an agreement on collective security in Europe and an end to NATO's "unilateralism". (This is understood to mean "one-sidedness" in the actions of a state acting only in its own interest without regard for the interests of others.)
Unfortunately, the US had already shown no interest in Russia's proposals at that time and instead continued to pursue its long-held plans for NATO expansion.
The violent Maidan coup in 2014
The second Russian proposal for negotiations came from Putin after the violent overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, which took place with the active complicity, if not complete direction, of the US government.
I was able to witness this complicity at close quarters in 2014, when the government invited me to urgent economic talks after the coup. When I arrived in Kiev, I was taken to the Maidan, where I was informed directly about the US financing of the Maidan protests.
The evidence of the US's complicity in the coup is overwhelming.
In January 2014, the US Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was caught on tape preparing the change of government in Ukraine in a telephone conversation.
In the meantime, US senators traveled to Kiev in person to fuel the protests (a comparable case would have occurred if Chinese or Russian politicians had come to Washington on January 6, 2021 to incite the crowd there to storm the Capitol).
On February 21, 2014, the Europeans, the US and Russia negotiated an agreement with Yanukovych in which he agreed to early elections.
But the rebels broke the agreement that same day, occupied government buildings, threatened further violence and deposed Yanukovych the next day.
The US supported the coup and immediately recognized the new government.
64 covert regime change operations since 1947
In my view, the Maidan coup was a covert regime change operation carried out by the CIA, of which there have been dozens around the world. These included 64 individual episodes between 1947 and 1989, which have been meticulously documented by Professor Lindsey O'Rourke.
Covert regime change operations are, of course, in many cases not completely hidden from the public, but the US government then categorically denies its role in them, keeps all documents strictly confidential and systematically deceives the world along the lines of: "Don't believe what you see with your own eyes! The USA has nothing to do with it."
Details slowly come to light
Details of these operations eventually come to light through eyewitnesses, whistleblowers, the forced release of documents under the Freedom of Information Act, the release of documents after years or decades, and also through memoirs, but of course most of it comes to the public far too late for real accountability.
In any case, the violent Maidan coup in 2014 in the ethnically Russian Donbass region in eastern Ukraine led to a break with the coup leaders in Kiev, many of whom were extremely Russophobic nationalists, including some violent groups with links to the Nazi SS in the past.
Consequences of the Maidan
Immediately after taking power, the coup leaders took steps to ban the use of the Russian language in the Russian-speaking Donbass region.
In the following months and years, the government in Kiev launched a military campaign to forcibly retake the breakaway territories, deploying neo-Nazi paramilitary units along with US weapons.
Minsk agreements: not implemented by the West
During 2014, Putin repeatedly called for a negotiated peace, which led to the Minsk II agreement in February 2015, based on the autonomy of Donbass and an end to violence on both sides.
In this agreement, Russia did not claim the Donbass as Russian territory, but instead demanded autonomy and the protection of ethnic Russians within Ukraine. The UN Security Council approved the Minsk II agreement, but the US neoconservatives secretly undermined it.
Years later, Chancellor Angela Merkel blurted out the truth. The Western side did not treat the agreement as a valid treaty under international law that had to be implemented, but resorted to delaying tactics to "buy time" for Ukraine.
In the meantime, around 14,000 people died in the fighting in Donbass between 2014 and 2021.
Russia's further proposal for negotiations in December 2021
After the final failure of the Minsk II agreement, Putin again proposed negotiations with the USA in December 2021. The topics to be discussed there even went beyond NATO expansion and included fundamental questions of nuclear armament.
Over the past few decades, the US neo-conservatives had gradually destroyed the nuclear arms control agreements with Russia, with the US unilaterally terminating the ABM Treaty on ballistic missile defense in 2002, stationing Aegis missiles in Poland and Romania from 2010, and even withdrawing from the INF Treaty in 2019.
In view of these dangerous developments, Putin put a draft "Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees" on the table on December 15, 2021.
As an immediate measure, Article 4 of this draft treaty proposed that the United States should abandon its attempt to expand NATO to include Ukraine.
At the end of 2021, I therefore called the US National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, to try to persuade the Biden White House to enter into these negotiations. My main advice was to avoid a war in Ukraine by accepting Ukraine's neutrality, rather than continuing to pursue NATO membership, which was a bright red line for Russia.
But the White House immediately rejected my advice, claiming in a remarkably nonsensical way that the expansion of NATO to include Ukraine was none of Russia's business! But here we have to ask ourselves the questions: What would the US say if a country in the Western Hemisphere decided to host Chinese or Russian bases?
Would the White House, the State Department or Congress say, "That's fine, that's just a matter between Russia or China and the host country"?
No, of course that would not happen. Let us remember: in 1962 the world came close to a nuclear Armageddon when the Soviet Union had deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba and the USA imposed a naval quarantine and threatened war if the Russians did not withdraw the missiles.
The conclusion I draw from this is that the US military alliance, NATO, has just as little business in Ukraine as Russian or Chinese military forces have anywhere near the US borders.
Editorial note: In an earlier version of this translation, Zbigniew Brzezinski was described as a "die-hard Russia-hater". This was a free addition that was not included in the original. The insert has been removed. The working method for translations by this author has been changed so that greater editorial control is guaranteed in the future.
The present article by Jeffrey D. Sachs, entitled "Why Won't the US Help Negotiate a Peaceful End to the War in Ukraine? For goodness' sake, negotiate!" was published on June 19, 2024 on the US website Common Dreams (footnote 18).
