Is Jeffrey Sachs a Putin Apologist?
By Matthew Parish
Sunday 18 October 2026
There is something peculiarly fascinating about the intellectual journey of Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the distinguished American economist who has spent much of his professional life advising governments, international institutions and political leaders about how to make the world a more prosperous and equitable place. Once celebrated as one of the most influential economic reformers of the post-Cold War era, Sachs has reinvented himself as an increasingly outspoken critic of American foreign policy, NATO enlargement and Western involvement in Ukraine’s war against Russian aggression. To his admirers, he is a courageous dissident against the intellectual orthodoxies of Washington and Brussels. To his detractors, particularly in Ukraine, he has become something considerably less admirable: an articulate and remarkably persistent apologist for Vladimir Putin.
The question deserves closer examination than the exchange of political insults that usually accompanies it. Jeffrey Sachs is an intelligent man, an accomplished economist and an intellectual whose contributions to the international development debate should not be dismissed merely because his opinions about Russia are controversial. Nor is it inherently disreputable to criticise NATO, American foreign policy or the strategic calculations underlying Western support for Ukraine. Indeed, some of the most grievous geopolitical mistakes of the last half-century have been committed by Western governments convinced of their own moral superiority. Nevertheless, an intellectual may begin by criticising the mistakes of his own government and end by adopting a framework in which virtually every act of aggression committed by another government is somehow explained away as the consequence of Western misconduct. The distance between these two positions is the distance between legitimate dissent and apologism.
It is precisely this distance that Jeffrey Sachs appears increasingly to have travelled. The difficulty is not that he wishes the war in Ukraine to end, nor that he advocates negotiations with Russia. Those are perfectly respectable positions, shared by many Ukrainians who have suffered more from this war than any American professor ever will. The difficulty lies in his distribution of political agency, historical responsibility and moral culpability. In Sachs’s account of contemporary European history, Russia is repeatedly depicted as reacting to circumstances created by others, while the United States is accorded an almost supernatural capacity to manipulate events. Ukraine, meanwhile, risks disappearing as an autonomous political community, becoming instead a geographical space within which the rival ambitions of Washington and Moscow are played out.
This is a curious intellectual outcome for a scholar who has devoted so much of his career to the proposition that poorer and weaker societies deserve the opportunity to determine their own futures. It is also a particularly uncomfortable proposition to contemplate from Lviv, where the consequences of Russian foreign policy are not principally encountered in academic seminars but in air raid sirens, electricity failures, military funerals and the lives of families whose members have disappeared into the trenches of eastern Ukraine.
Sachs’s principal geopolitical argument is straightforward. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States abandoned the opportunity to construct a genuinely inclusive European security architecture. Instead, American administrations of both political parties pursued the enlargement of NATO towards Russia’s borders. Moscow repeatedly warned that it regarded this policy as threatening its fundamental security interests, and Washington largely disregarded those warnings. The situation became particularly dangerous after NATO’s Bucharest summit in 2008, when the alliance declared that Ukraine and Georgia would eventually become members. For Sachs, this was an act of extraordinary strategic irresponsibility, one that helped make subsequent confrontation with Russia predictable, if not inevitable.
There is considerably more merit in this argument than many of Sachs’s critics are prepared to acknowledge. The Bucharest declaration was indeed a peculiar compromise, offering Ukraine and Georgia the prospect of eventual NATO membership without providing an immediate guarantee of their security. It was an invitation to aspire to membership without an assurance of protection in the meantime. Western governments might reasonably be criticised for having opened a geopolitical door that they were unwilling to walk through. Nor is it unreasonable to suggest that NATO expansion contributed to the deterioration of relations between Russia and the West. States respond to perceived threats as well as actual threats, and the failure to understand another country’s security perceptions can be a serious diplomatic mistake.
However, this explanation contains an obvious omission. Why did the countries of Central and Eastern Europe wish to join NATO in the first place? They did not do so principally because American intelligence officers had persuaded them to participate in an elaborate conspiracy against Moscow. They did so because they remembered what it was like to live under Soviet domination, and because they feared that a post-Soviet Russia might eventually seek to recover some of the power that its predecessor had exercised over them. The Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and others were not simply passive objects in an American strategy for encircling Russia. They were political communities with their own historical experiences, security anxieties and democratic aspirations. A theory of international relations that treats the security concerns of Russia as fundamental while relegating those of its neighbours to secondary importance is not an adequate account of European geopolitics.
This is the first major weakness in Sachs’s reasoning: his conception of the international system remains curiously dominated by great powers. It is a world in which Washington and Moscow possess genuine political agency, while the nations unfortunate enough to lie between them are expected to accommodate themselves to arrangements negotiated over their heads. Sachs might respond that this is simply the way international politics works, and there is a considerable realist tradition supporting such an argument. Nevertheless, an explanation of power politics is not necessarily a moral justification for its outcomes. The fact that Russia possesses nuclear weapons and a large army does not confer upon it the right to determine the constitutional and diplomatic future of Ukraine.
The problem becomes still more acute when Sachs turns to the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity in 2014. In his telling, the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych was substantially the consequence of American interference, an American-backed coup that destroyed Ukraine’s neutrality and precipitated the subsequent conflict. The implication is that the inhabitants of Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities were essentially instruments of Washington’s geopolitical ambitions. Yet the immediate origins of the Maidan protests lay in Yanukovych’s decision to abandon an association agreement with the European Union, followed by the government’s violent response to demonstrators. Western politicians undoubtedly sought to influence events, and the revolutionary transition was neither procedurally tidy nor politically uncomplicated. But external influence does not establish that the revolution was manufactured by the United States. Sachs repeatedly advances the stronger proposition without adequately demonstrating it.
Anyone familiar with Ukraine knows that this is a society with an extraordinarily complicated political history, often plagued by corruption, oligarchic manipulation and bitter disputes about national identity. It is not necessary to romanticise the Maidan revolution, or any subsequent Ukrainian government, to recognise that millions of Ukrainians possessed perfectly intelligible reasons for rejecting the country’s subordination to Moscow. Ukraine’s political trajectory since 1991 has been shaped by competing domestic interests, changing electoral coalitions, economic grievances and increasingly intense arguments about the meaning of Ukrainian sovereignty. To reduce this entire history to American interference is to substitute a geopolitical conspiracy theory for the untidy reality of a developing democratic state.
Sachs’s treatment of Russian-speaking Ukrainians is similarly problematic. He has repeatedly emphasised Ukraine’s linguistic, cultural and regional divisions, often suggesting that the conflict in the Donbas emerged from an unresolved confrontation between two distinct political communities. Yet the relationship between language and political identity in Ukraine is far less straightforward than this interpretation suggests. Russian-speaking Ukrainians have fought and died in enormous numbers defending their country against Russia. Many inhabitants of Kharkiv, Odesa and other predominantly Russian-speaking urban centres regard Moscow’s invasion with particular bitterness. Speaking Russian does not make a Ukrainian a Russian nationalist, any more than speaking English makes an Irishman a loyal subject of the British Crown.
The history of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union is relevant here, but not always in the way Sachs imagines. In a substantial essay published in 2025, he argued that Russian strategic conduct had historically been motivated more by fear of Western invasion than by expansionist ambition. He went so far as to characterise Soviet domination of Eastern Europe after the Second World War as essentially a security measure rather than an imperial project. There is a legitimate historical discussion to be had about the strategic anxieties arising from Russia’s repeated experience of invasion. Nevertheless, to portray Soviet domination primarily as a defensive response is to overlook the experiences of the millions of Eastern Europeans who suffered political repression, forced ideological conformity and the denial of national self-determination under that system.
Indeed, this reveals a second and more serious flaw in Sachs’s thinking. He is exceptionally willing to contextualise Russian aggression while appearing comparatively reluctant to contextualise the fears of Russia’s victims. Russian political decisions are understood through centuries of historical insecurity. Ukrainian political decisions are understood primarily through the manipulations of Washington. The asymmetry is remarkable, and it becomes particularly conspicuous when Sachs discusses Vladimir Putin himself.
Putin is not merely a Russian leader seeking security guarantees in a dangerous international environment. He is also the architect of an increasingly authoritarian political system, a politician who has progressively eliminated meaningful domestic opposition and a ruler who has repeatedly challenged the legitimacy of Ukrainian independence. In his address of 21 February 2022, Putin denied that Ukraine possessed an authentic tradition of statehood. His account of Ukrainian history was not merely an argument about NATO enlargement; it was a direct assault upon the political legitimacy of an independent neighbouring nation. These ideas cannot simply be dismissed as rhetorical decorations surrounding a more fundamental dispute about military alliances. They are part of the ideological framework through which Putin has justified Russian territorial expansion.
One of the most revealing moments in Sachs’s public commentary occurred during his 2023 interview with Isaac Chotiner in The New Yorker. Challenged about Putin’s explicitly imperial historical arguments, Sachs acknowledged that he disliked such statements but insisted that they were not central to understanding the war. He returned instead to NATO enlargement and American strategic misconduct. The exchange exposed a profound analytical disagreement. Sachs’s interviewer wanted to understand Putin as an individual political actor possessing his own ambitions and ideological commitments. Sachs preferred to regard him principally as the representative of Russian security interests within an international system dominated by American power.
This is not merely a difference of emphasis. It raises the philosophical question of whether individuals remain morally responsible for their conduct when that conduct takes place within an international system that encourages conflict. A man who commits murder does not cease to be responsible because his neighbours have behaved provocatively towards him. Equally, a state that invades its neighbour cannot escape responsibility merely because it considers the neighbouring state’s foreign policy objectionable. International politics undoubtedly involves structural pressures, security dilemmas and competing historical grievances. But structural explanations cannot simply abolish political choice.
Sachs’s account of the abortive peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in the spring of 2022 presents another revealing example. He has repeatedly suggested that a settlement was within reach and that American and British interference prevented Ukraine from accepting it. There were indeed serious negotiations in Istanbul, and it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility that opportunities for peace were missed. Western governments were certainly influential in Kyiv’s calculations, and their reluctance to embrace proposed security arrangements deserves scrutiny. Nevertheless, detailed research by Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko has demonstrated that the negotiations also contained substantial unresolved disagreements, including the future of Ukrainian military capabilities, disputed territory and the practical operation of international security guarantees. In one draft, Russia sought arrangements that could have given it an effective veto over intervention by Ukraine’s guarantors. The evidence does not justify reducing the failure of the negotiations to a simple story of Western sabotage.
The distinction matters because the credibility of any peace agreement depends upon the parties’ willingness and capacity to implement it. A treaty providing that Ukraine will remain neutral is of limited reassurance if Russia simultaneously retains the power to invade Ukraine whenever she dislikes developments in Kyiv. Neutrality is not a magical formula that guarantees security. It requires an effective political and legal architecture, supported by sufficiently credible guarantees to deter renewed aggression. Ukraine’s experience since 2014 provides ample grounds for scepticism about assurances that depend principally upon Moscow’s goodwill. Sachs is right to emphasise the necessity of diplomacy, but he devotes insufficient attention to the problem of ensuring that diplomatic agreements are enforceable against the stronger party.
Nevertheless, it would be unfair to suggest that Sachs simply celebrates Russian military victories or explicitly endorses the annexation of Ukrainian territory as a matter of moral principle. He has spoken repeatedly about the suffering caused by the war, the dangers of nuclear escalation and the immense economic costs of prolonged conflict. He has advocated arrangements involving Russian troop withdrawals and international guarantees for Ukrainian security. His concern that Western governments might pursue unrealistic military objectives at the expense of Ukrainian lives is neither inherently malicious nor intellectually frivolous. Indeed, there is a legitimate debate about whether particular Western policies have prolonged the fighting without sufficiently improving the prospects of a durable settlement.
The deeper question is whether Sachs applies equivalent standards of intellectual scrutiny to both sides. When Washington makes an objectionable decision, he is frequently prepared to describe it in uncompromising moral terms. American conduct in Iraq, Syria, Libya and elsewhere is subjected to severe criticism, often with considerable justification. When Moscow makes an equally objectionable decision, however, the analysis tends to shift towards the historical circumstances that supposedly made the decision understandable. It is this recurring difference in moral emphasis, rather than his willingness to criticise NATO, that makes the accusation of apologism plausible.
In March 2023, a group of economists, including numerous Ukrainian scholars, published an open letter challenging Sachs’s presentation of the war. They identified what they regarded as historical misrepresentations, the denial of Ukrainian political agency and an unwillingness to confront the implications of Russian territorial aggression. They also criticised his appearances on programmes hosted by the Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov. Their objections were not merely that Sachs held opinions unfavourable to Ukraine. Their central concern was that his analytical framework reproduced important elements of the Kremlin’s explanation of the conflict while marginalising the independent political interests of Ukrainians themselves.
The criticisms have acquired additional significance as Sachs has continued to elaborate his historical interpretation. In an essay published in December 2025, he characterised European relations with Russia as a recurring pattern of structural Russophobia extending across two centuries. The argument is ambitious, ranging from the Crimean War through the Soviet period to the contemporary conflict in Ukraine. Yet its extraordinary historical sweep creates difficulties of its own. If virtually every substantial European disagreement with Russia can be explained through an inherited Western prejudice against Russian security interests, it becomes difficult to identify the circumstances in which Russian conduct might itself be the principal cause of European hostility. A theory that accommodates every conceivable Russian action by explaining it through preceding Western behaviour risks becoming unfalsifiable.
The proposition becomes particularly difficult to sustain when examined against contemporary events. In October 2026, Putin announced that Russia was establishing a security zone inside Ukrainian territory, describing it as non-negotiable in any future peace settlement. The area extends into parts of the Sumy and Kharkiv regions that Russia has not formally claimed to have annexed. Moscow continues to exercise military pressure upon Ukrainian cities and infrastructure while expanding the territorial scope of what it regards as necessary for its security. At what point does a security interest become an unlimited entitlement to occupy somebody else’s country? At what point does the vocabulary of defensive necessity become indistinguishable from the vocabulary of imperial expansion?
It is here that Sachs’s arguments encounter their most difficult empirical test. If Russia’s invasion were fundamentally the product of threatened NATO enlargement, one might expect a negotiated settlement centred upon Ukrainian neutrality to provide the essential basis for peace. Yet Putin’s repeated territorial demands, historical assertions and military actions suggest that the conflict cannot be understood solely in those terms. Russia’s objectives have involved not only preventing Ukrainian membership of a Western military alliance but also determining the limits of Ukrainian political independence. An intellectual account that persistently subordinates these objectives to the question of American provocation cannot adequately explain the conduct it purports to analyse.
There is also a paradox in Sachs’s professional history. During the transition from communism, he was an enthusiastic advocate of economic transformation in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He believed that countries escaping authoritarian economic systems could construct more prosperous societies through ambitious institutional reform and international cooperation. His subsequent disillusionment with Western policy is understandable, particularly given the uneven and often painful outcomes of post-Soviet economic transition. But it remains curious that a man who once advocated such radical transformation should now appear so willing to accept a geopolitical settlement in which the sovereignty of smaller nations is constrained by the anxieties of their larger neighbours.
Perhaps the answer lies in a broader transformation of Sachs’s intellectual worldview. His earlier economic thought placed considerable emphasis upon institutional reform, international development and the possibilities of political improvement. His contemporary geopolitical arguments are more deterministic, emphasising the enduring power of military geography, historical grievance and great-power rivalry. In this framework, the ambitions of individual societies become subordinate to the demands of systemic stability. The trouble is that the international system does not consist merely of states pursuing abstract security interests. It consists of people who possess memories, loyalties, fears, aspirations and rights. It is entirely possible to produce an elegant model of geopolitical equilibrium that leaves millions of actual human beings living under foreign domination.
A further difficulty concerns the relationship between peace and justice. Sachs frequently writes as though the moral imperative of ending the war is so overwhelming that prolonged Ukrainian resistance requires an exceptional justification. Yet Ukrainians are entitled to distinguish between the immediate cessation of military operations and a political settlement capable of securing their future independence. A ceasefire that permits Russia to consolidate territorial acquisitions while preparing for renewed aggression may reduce suffering in the short term while increasing the likelihood of another war. Conversely, a strategy of indefinite military resistance without realistic political objectives may impose unacceptable costs upon the Ukrainian population. Neither possibility should be excluded from serious analysis, and neither can be resolved by the simple declaration that negotiations are preferable to fighting.
The purpose of diplomacy is not to produce a document bearing the signatures of mutually distrustful governments. It is to establish arrangements that change the incentives of those governments sufficiently to make renewed war less attractive than continued peace. That requires a clear understanding of what each party actually wants, what it is prepared to surrender and what mechanisms might restrain it from violating its commitments. It also requires recognising that the stronger party’s security preferences do not automatically override the weaker party’s sovereignty. Sachs recognises the first part of this problem with considerable sophistication. He is much less persuasive on the second.
We may therefore return to the original question. Is Jeffrey Sachs a Putin apologist? The answer depends partly upon what we mean by the term. If an apologist is someone who knowingly serves the Kremlin, secretly takes instructions from Russian officials or deliberately disseminates Russian propaganda in return for material benefits, then no such conclusion is established by the evidence considered here. Serious accusations of that kind require evidence, not merely indignation at controversial opinions. Sachs may be entirely sincere in believing that Western strategic arrogance is the central explanation for the war and that his proposals would save Ukrainian lives. Intellectual sincerity, however, is not a guarantee of intellectual accuracy.
If, on the other hand, an apologist is someone whose arguments systematically minimise the independent responsibility of an aggressor by placing his conduct within an explanatory framework that repeatedly shifts blame towards others, then the description becomes considerably more persuasive. Sachs does not need to admire Putin personally to provide an apologetic account of his conduct. Nor does he need to approve of Russian military operations to advance arguments that diminish the moral and political responsibility of those directing them. Apologism is not necessarily a profession of loyalty. Sometimes it is simply the cumulative consequence of a persistent analytical bias.
There is a final irony. Sachs is right that Russia cannot simply be wished away from the European political system. Russia is a large country, possesses an enormous nuclear arsenal and will remain an indispensable participant in any durable European security settlement. Its legitimate security interests must ultimately be reconciled with those of neighbouring states. The mistake is to imagine that reconciliation requires treating Russia’s account of its own behaviour as substantially authoritative. A stable European order cannot be constructed upon either Western fantasies of Russian disappearance or Russian fantasies of Ukrainian subordination. It requires accepting that both Russia and Ukraine are sovereign states, neither of which is entitled to impose its political system upon the other.
From Lviv, the limitations of Sachs’s worldview are especially apparent. The city stands at one of the great historical intersections of European civilisation, having passed through successive imperial and political systems without losing its distinctive identity. Its architectural splendour bears witness to the ambitions of empires, while its contemporary political life expresses the determination of a population that does not wish to become the possession of another one. Lviv has known Polish, Austrian, Soviet and Ukrainian administrations, and its history is rich with the complexities of language, nationality and political allegiance. But contemporary Lviv is not a geopolitical abstraction or an object to be exchanged between Washington and Moscow. It is a living European city whose inhabitants have chosen the country to which they belong.
Perhaps Jeffrey Sachs should spend some time here, not attending an international conference or delivering a lecture about the mistakes of NATO, but walking through the streets during an air raid warning, visiting the military cemetery, speaking to refugees from occupied territories and listening to Ukrainian soldiers explain why they are fighting. He might discover that the people of Ukraine have political opinions that do not originate in the Pentagon. He might also discover that the desire to live independently of Russian coercion is neither Russophobia nor an expression of American imperial ambition. It is simply the ordinary human aspiration to determine one’s own future.
That would not necessarily oblige him to abandon his criticisms of Western policy, many of which deserve to be heard. It might, however, encourage him to apply the same intellectual standards to Moscow that he demands of Washington, and to recognise that political responsibility cannot be dissolved in historical explanation.
Jeffrey Sachs is not wrong to advocate peace. He is not wrong to criticise American imperial pretensions. He is not wrong to warn against the dangers of nuclear escalation. He is wrong when these legitimate concerns become part of an interpretation in which Russian aggression is persistently treated as the predictable consequence of Western decisions, while Ukrainian sovereignty is accorded an increasingly subordinate role. In that important and substantive sense, his arguments have become apologetic towards Putin, whether or not that was ever his intention.
The tragedy is that Sachs is capable of better. His intellectual talents are considerable, and his long career demonstrates a genuine concern for the welfare of humanity. Yet intellectual brilliance is no defence against the temptation to become captive to a single explanatory theory. The greatest danger facing a public intellectual is not that he will occasionally be wrong, but that he will become so convinced of the comprehensiveness of his own account of the world that he ceases to recognise facts that challenge it.
Jeffrey Sachs has spent much of his life seeking to explain how countries might escape poverty, instability and political subordination. It would be a worthwhile conclusion to that career if he were to recognise that Ukraine is seeking precisely the same thing. Its people do not wish to become instruments of American foreign policy, and they certainly do not wish to become subjects of Vladimir Putin. They wish to remain Ukrainians, living in an independent country at peace with its neighbours.
Any theory of European security that cannot accommodate that modest ambition is not a theory of peace. It is merely another elaborate justification for the privileges of power.
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This article has been sent to Professor Sachs informing him of his right of reply and inviting him to do so.
