Jeffrey Sachs concludes his 21 March piece “The Urgency of Diplomacy” as follows:
It has been the US and its allies that have broken agreements and refused diplomacy. THE US VIOLATED ITS SOLEMN PLEDGES to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and to Russian President Boris Yeltsin that NATO would not move one inch eastward. THE US CHEATED by…
Jeffrey Sachs concludes his 21 March piece “The Urgency of Diplomacy” as follows:
It has been the US and its allies that have broken agreements and refused diplomacy. THE US VIOLATED ITS SOLEMN PLEDGES to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and to Russian President Boris Yeltsin that NATO would not move one inch eastward. THE US CHEATED by supporting the violent coup in Kiev that toppled Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych. THE US, GERMANY, FRANCE, AND THE UK, DUPLICITOUSLY REFUSED to back the Minsk II agreement. THE US UNILATERALLY WITHDREW from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and from the Intermediate Force Agreement in 2019. THE US REFUSED to negotiate when Putin proposed a draft Russia-US Treaty on Security Guarantees on December 15, 2021.
There has in fact been no direct diplomacy between Biden and Putin since the beginning of 2022. And when Russia and Ukraine negotiated directly in March 2022, the UK and US stepped in to block an agreement based on Ukrainian neutrality. Putin reiterated Russia’s openness to negotiations in his interview with Tucker Carlson last month and did so again more recently.
The war rages on, with hundreds of thousands dead and with hundreds of billions of dollars of destruction. We are coming closer to the nuclear abyss. It’s time to talk.
In the immortal words and wisdom of JFK in his Inaugural Address, “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”
Jeffrey Sachs concludes his 21 March piece “The Urgency of Diplomacy” as follows:
It has been the US and its allies that have broken agreements and refused diplomacy. THE US VIOLATED ITS SOLEMN PLEDGES to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and to Russian President Boris Yeltsin that NATO would not move one inch eastward. THE US CHEATED by supporting the violent coup in Kiev that toppled Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych. THE US, GERMANY, FRANCE, AND THE UK, DUPLICITOUSLY REFUSED to back the Minsk II agreement. THE US UNILATERALLY WITHDREW from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and from the Intermediate Force Agreement in 2019. THE US REFUSED to negotiate when Putin proposed a draft Russia-US Treaty on Security Guarantees on December 15, 2021.
There has in fact been no direct diplomacy between Biden and Putin since the beginning of 2022. And when Russia and Ukraine negotiated directly in March 2022, the UK and US stepped in to block an agreement based on Ukrainian neutrality. Putin reiterated Russia’s openness to negotiations in his interview with Tucker Carlson last month and did so again more recently.
The war rages on, with hundreds of thousands dead and with hundreds of billions of dollars of destruction. We are coming closer to the nuclear abyss. It’s time to talk.
In the immortal words and wisdom of JFK in his Inaugural Address, “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”
Source: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/ukraine-war-diplomacy ; EMPHASES added.