Jeffrey Sachs: I Am a Defender of Ukraine
By Jeffrey Sachs
Monday 19 October 2026
I thank the Lviv Herald for the right of reply. I wish to state my position plainly. I am a defender of Ukraine and of peace. I believe in the concept of indivisible security, meaning for Ukraine, Russia, and Europe. Those who have urged Ukraine to keep fighting a war that cannot be won on the battlefield, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives, are not its true defenders. The tragedy of Ukraine is that it has been used by the United States and its European allies as a pawn in their proxy war against Russia.
This idea is not my invention. Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997) treats Eurasia as the chessboard on which America’s global primacy would be won or lost. Brzezinski defined “geopolitical pivots” as “the states whose importance is derived not from their power and motivation but rather from their sensitive location and from the consequences of their potentially vulnerable condition for the behavior of geostrategic players.” Ukraine was such a pivot, valued, in his words, because “its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia.” In plain terms, a geopolitical pivot is a country whose importance lies not in its own people and purposes but in its usefulness to the United States in a contest with another great power. Ukraine mattered to this strategy not for the sake of Ukrainians but for what it could do to Russia. The strategists of American primacy have treated Ukraine as a piece on a chessboard, and I have opposed them for years for exactly that reason.
My concern for Ukraine is not new. More than three decades ago I volunteered my time, free of any charge, to advise President Leonid Kuchma in the early years of Ukraine’s independence, because I wanted Ukraine to succeed as a prosperous and sovereign state. Since then I have watched with sorrow as Western governments used Ukraine for their own purposes, and they did so at every decisive moment.
Consider the record. On February 21, 2014, the foreign ministers of Germany and Poland and a representative of France brokered an agreement between President Viktor Yanukovych and the opposition that provided for a return to the 2004 constitution, a government of national unity, and early presidential elections by December 2014. Within a day Yanukovych was violently overthrown, and the United States and the European governments immediately backed the new authorities rather than insisting on the agreement that Europe itself had just negotiated. I recommend to readers Professor Ivan Katchanovski’s book The Russia-Ukraine War and Its Origins: From the Maidan to the Ukraine War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026), which is available free of charge as an open-access publication at https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/107711 and sets out the detailed evidence on the violence of February 2014. Many Ukrainians on the Maidan had genuine grievances. The question is what the NATO powers did with those grievances. The intercepted telephone call in which a senior U.S. official and the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv discussed who should and should not join the next Ukrainian government, weeks before the overthrow, speaks for itself.
When the Minsk II agreement of February 2015, endorsed unanimously by the UN Security Council in Resolution 2202, offered an end to the conflict in the Donbas, the United States opposed its implementation. Former Chancellor Angela Merkel said in December 2022 that the Minsk process had been an attempt to give Ukraine time. Using a peace agreement to buy time for war destroyed trust and helped to bring on the far larger war that followed.
In her memoir, Freedom (2024), Merkel recalls that at the Bucharest summit in 2008, “for Putin, the fact that NATO had made a general pledge of membership equated to the two countries becoming members and was therefore a declaration of war.” Putin later told her, “You won’t be chancellor forever, and then they’ll become NATO members. And I’m going to prevent that.” Tragically, events bore him out. At the end of 2021, the dramatic escalation of the war could have been averted on the basis of Ukrainian neutrality and no further NATO enlargement, but the United States refused to negotiate on that point. NATO’s own Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, told the European Parliament in September 2023 that Putin had demanded a promise of no more NATO enlargement, that NATO refused, and that Putin “went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.” Ukraine was used to fight NATO’s proxy war.
In March and April 2022, when Ukraine was aiming to sign an agreement with Russia in Istanbul, the United States and the United Kingdom told Ukraine to keep fighting. David Arakhamia, who led Ukraine’s delegation, later stated that Russia’s central demand was neutrality and that Prime Minister Boris Johnson told Kyiv not to sign anything and to fight on. Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko have documented the issues that remained unresolved in Istanbul. Those issues were real, and that is precisely why the negotiations should have continued rather than been abandoned in favor of continued war.
At each of these moments I pleaded publicly for the path that would save Ukrainian lives and restore peace. Each rejected settlement has been followed by harsher terms for Ukraine. Honoring Minsk II would have averted any Russian claim of territory in the Donbas. Neutrality would have averted the escalation of 2022, and the Istanbul draft of 2022 offered Ukraine far more than anything available today. The longer the war has continued, the worse the terms have become.
Ukraine’s own Declaration of State Sovereignty of July 16, 1990, proclaimed Ukraine’s intention to become a permanently neutral state that does not take part in military blocs. Until 2014 most Ukrainians opposed NATO membership, and in 2010 the Verkhovna Rada wrote Ukraine’s non-bloc status into law. In 2019 Ukrainians elected President Zelensky with 73 percent of the vote on his promise to end the war in the Donbas. Neutrality is therefore not a Russian imposition. It was Ukraine’s own founding choice and its people’s repeated preference, and it was abandoned under Western manipulation.
Security in Europe is indivisible, as the Helsinki Final Act and the Charter of Paris declare, and as the OSCE affirmed at Istanbul in 1999, no state may strengthen its security at the expense of the security of others. That principle protects Ukraine as much as it protects Russia.
In that spirit I have circulated a framework to end the war now, before Ukraine suffers any more. It rests on Ukrainian neutrality, a formal end to NATO enlargement eastward, and an armistice line. Ukraine and Russia do not need to agree on legal borders in order to stop the killing. They should agree on an armistice line, with each side exercising de facto jurisdiction on its side of the line, a pledge by both to renounce force in any future adjustments, and a return to diplomacy. The Korean Armistice of 1953 has kept the peace for more than seventy years without settling questions of sovereignty, and Austria’s neutrality after 1955 was respected by both blocs throughout the Cold War while Austria prospered. My suggested framework provides for mutual demilitarization on both sides of the line, international monitoring, endorsement by the UN Security Council, the lifting of sanctions tied to compliance, and a program of reconstruction. Ukraine would keep its armed forces and its freedom to choose its government and economic partners. The settlement would remove the causes of the war. Of course these are my own ideas; real negotiations, as in Istanbul in 2022, are needed urgently to reach a settlement around such a framework for peace.
I am nobody’s apologist. I am a believer in life and peace, and in indivisible security for all countries, Ukraine and Russia alike. What I oppose is the way that the United States and Europe have brazenly and brutally used Ukraine as a geopolitical pivot in their own cynical chess game. Ukrainians rightly wish to live in an independent country at peace with its neighbors. The way to reach that goal is to end the war by ending NATO’s misuse of Ukraine as its geopolitical pivot.
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Jeffrey Sachs is an American economist and public policy analyst, and a Professor at Columbia University.
