SHANGHAI, July 22. /TASS/. The US administration was unwilling to stop NATO’s expansion and prevent a conflict in Ukraine, Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University in New York, told TASS.
"President Putin said to President Biden in December 2021: ‘Here is a security agreement. You stop NATO enlargement.’ I called the White House at the end of 2021 to talk to Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor. I said: 'Jake, avoid a war, say that NATO won't enlarge.' He said: 'No, we can't say that.' Why? 'So we have an open-door policy,'" said the expert who visited Fudan University in Shanghai, China.
When Sachs asked Sullivan if the open-door policy was also in effect for Russia and whether Moscow could establish a military foothold in the Western Hemisphere, the US national security advisor told the political scientist not to worry because "NATO won’t enlarge" and "there won’t be a war."
"This is the American government. It's like children, actually. This is so nonsensical, the conversations that I experience; they seem to know nothing or to say, ‘don't worry, everything's fine.’ And then you have three years of war afterwards. To my mind, this war could have been avoided as late as January 2022. They blew it in," Sachs observed.
After the Istanbul negotiations kicked off in April 2022, Sachs traveled to Ankara to talk to Turkish mediators. "There was a draft agreement on April 15, 2022. Nearly complete. The US said, ‘don't sign that,’ and Zelensky abandoned it. The US has prevented peace from the beginning," Sachs noted.
In December 2021, Russia submitted security guarantee proposals to the US and NATO, requesting a legal commitment that NATO would halt eastward expansion and go back to the 1997 borders. However, in January 2022, Washington and Brussels responded in writing, rejecting concessions Moscow deemed critical.